


Doctor Spencer ... Who? : Soft Romance, Hard Science

by Kairae



Category: Criminal Minds, Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Book: The Sign of the Four, Episode Fix-it, Episode: s02e13 Doomsday, Episode: s08e12 Zugzwang, Epsiode Fix-it: s02e13 Doomsday, F/M, M/M, Quantum Mechanics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-05
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-04-30 03:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 53,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5148410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kairae/pseuds/Kairae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fueled by quantum premonitions of immanent romantic tragedy, Spencer Reid and the Tenth Doctor must join forces to save the women they both love ... and stop the universe from collapsing in the process. A combined Zugzwang/Doomsday fix-it, this experimental "cinematic novel" is a mashup of equal parts Doctor Who season 2 episodes 5-13, and Criminal Minds season 8 episodes 4-12, altering which of the two shows is dominant every other episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rise of the God Complex

**Author's Note:**

> This is my "cinematic novel" for NaNoWriMo 2015! Since I'm writing the entire thing this month, my goal is to post a new chapter here every 3-4 days. I may need to go back and do some editing/slight changes later, but if you enjoy the story, please rate and review to help encourage me in this insanely difficult challenge! :) **NOTE: Since this is a fix-it, the base storylines and some of the dialogue are taken or slightly adapted from the original shows. I do not claim ownership of that writing or any of these characters.**

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When an unsub in New Mexico attempts to transplant his victims' legs onto each other, Reid must turn to a mysterious woman in a phone booth -- and a mysterious man in a phone box -- to catch the criminal. In the process, he blurs the boundaries of learning about unexpected love, and teaching about impossible physics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my "cinematic novel" for NaNoWriMo 2015! Since I'm writing the entire thing this month, my goal is to post a new chapter here every few days. I may need to go back and do some editing/slight changes later, but if you enjoy the story, please rate and review to help encourage me in this insanely difficult challenge! :) **NOTE: Since this is a fix-it, the base storylines and some of the dialogue are taken or slightly adapted from the original shows. I do not claim ownership of that writing or any of these characters.**
> 
> _Update note: After my initial post, I updated this chapter on 11/8 for minor formatting, typos, and continuity with Chapter 2._

**Title overlay: QUANTICO, VIRGINIA**

The episode fades in, panning across a bedroom that is just barely lit by the first soft rays of morning sun peeking through a pleasant four-paned window. The walls are pale blue-green, a nice contrast to the dark oak bookshelf that reaches almost all the way to the ceiling. This shelf is completely full and chronologically organized, boasting volumes that range from _The Book of Marjery Kempe,_ to _The Sign of the Four,_ to a very thick, very new looking black paperback copy of the complete _Arcades Project._

We pan past the bookshelf to see the headboard of a large oak bed, which matches the bookshelf perfectly. However, when the bed’s occupant comes into view, the mood of the scene suddenly becomes tense and uneasy.

Dr. Spencer Reid is asleep, halfway underneath a deep scarlet comforter. He is wearing a nicely fitted white T-shirt with a deep V-neck, his arms flexing and un-flexing as he appears to be having some kind of nightmare. His caramel brown hair, which is usually perfectly in place, is tousled in inconsistent chunks and folds. We zoom in on his eyes, which move ever so slightly under his naturally long lashes, and the scene fades to show the dream that he’s having.

_The nightmare appears to be taking place in a bright white room. Everything is blurry and filtered through extremely high-contrast lighting, making it difficult to see._

_A voice is echoing through the dream. “Hold on!” it shouts, even as it’s being drowned out by an overpowering wind. Then, more urgently, it insists: “Hold on!”_

_The figure of a woman, indistinguishable except that she is fair-skinned and wearing something blue, appears in the middle of the scene, but is only present for a moment. She begins to slip away, getting smaller and smaller …_

Suddenly, everything disappears as Reid shoots up in his bed.

“No!” he shouts out desperately, in full volume. He is breathing hard, in and out, gasping to catch his breath. He throws his hands up to his face and ruffles his fingers through his hair. His hands stay there for just a moment, until he winces in pain. He then moves his hands to the sides of his head and grimaces, all the while continuing to struggle with his breathing. As he continues to gasp, he begins mumbling something under his breath, unbeknownst even to himself. His words get gradually louder as he repeats them.

“Take me back … Take me back … Take me back …”

After a moment, Reid catches himself saying it, and lowers his arms slowly away from his head. His hands are shaking. He looks down at them with the glossy gleam of water welling up in his eyes. He softens his brow, which causes him to look like a very sad puppy.

“Take me back … ” he whispers one more time, and blinks back the tears. He blinks a few more times, puts his hands into his lap, and then sighs deeply.

“It was just a dream,” he says to himself, and looks up. However, his face shows that he is clearly emotionally affected. “Just a dream … but why did it hurt so badly?”

************************************

**Title overlay: TARDIS, SOMEWHERE**

The Doctor and his companion, Rose Tyler, are sitting in front of the Tardis control panel. A soft blue-green light, very similar to the color of Reid’s bedroom, illuminates a clear cylinder in the middle of the space, which also casts a bit of color onto their faces and clothes. They are sitting on a funky yellow bench that appears to be straight out of the 1970s: it’s mustard-yellow, and made up of dozens of several round cushions all pieced together.

The Tardis is filled with the echoing sounds of The Doctor and Rose laughing with each other. Even though they’re seated, it’s clear that The Doctor is tall, trim, and gorgeous, wearing his usual three-piece brown pinstripe suit with an off-white shirt and blue tie. His perfect hair is perfect.

Rose, who is blonde and curvy, wears a trendy purple leather jacket over a low-cut tank top. Her makeup emphasizes all her best features: thick black eyeliner and mascara bring out her sparkling hazel eyes, and transparent-shimmer lip gloss draws attention to her full lips.

The Doctor is emphatically recounting a story from their past adventures, and the look on Rose’s face shows how delighted she is to be sharing the memory. She chimes in now and again as the two bounce their conversation off one another, filling in details as they go, both smiling in genuine happiness.

Unexpectedly, however, we get an angle on Mickey—Rose’s best friend, who they seem to have forgotten is even with them. Though he speaks, like Rose, with an obvious London accent, he is of Trinidadian heritage. He is nicely built, but it’s hard to tell beneath the oversized brown sweater that he’s wearing.

The deadpan look on Mickey’s face reveals that he is not included in the story they are telling, and feels left out. The Doctor and Rose don’t notice.

In fact, The Doctor is instead very focused on casually, slowly, moving his arm around Rose in the classic “stretching out in the movie theater” maneuver. Just as he’s about to move in close to her, there is a sudden BANG!

Sparks and flames explode from the Tardis console in a giant cloud. The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey are thrown to the ground as the Tardis shakes violently for several seconds. After a moment, luckily, it stops.

Rose, lying on the floor, props herself up with one elbow. “What’s happened?” she asks quickly.

Meanwhile, The Doctor scrambles up to his feet, his off-white Converse All Stars pattering lightly on the floor as he rushes over to investigate the situation. He pushes several buttons, pulls a lever, and then squints at the blue light coming from the cylinder, but it’s flickering. At first, the light is mostly on, but as it flickers more and more, the room gets darker for longer and longer periods of time. It’s apparent that the light is on the verge of going out.

“Something has got … ” The Doctor begins to respond, but sheer incredulity stops him from continuing any further.

“Got what?” Mickey is still lying on the floor, but has at least sat up a bit.

“Something is tangled up with the Tardis.”

“What’d’you mean, ‘tangled up with the Tardis’?” Rose asks, as she puts her hands onto the ground and helps herself to her feet. She walks over to The Doctor, and stands close beside him.

The Doctor whips his brown tortoise-shell glasses out of his suit pocket and puts them on as he further examines the Tardis control panel. The light is mostly off by this point, only flickering back on once every few seconds.

“When you’re traveling through time and space, sometimes you encounter things that are entangled—groups of particles that interact in such a particular way that the quantum state of each can’t be described on its own, but has to be described in relationship to the other.”

Both Mickey and Rose are completely silent in response.

“We’ve got stuck to something,” he says in layman’s terms. “Whatever it does will now determine whatever we do, and, well, vice versa.”

“And this kind of thing just _happens_ to the Tardis?” Rose asks.

“Well,” The Doctor purses his lips and looks up to the corners of his dark brown eyes in thought. “It’s … theoretically possible.” He shrugs.

Mickey is just now rising to his feet, still bewildered by the whole thing, when suddenly, the Tardis is violently moved by another jolt. This one is much more forceful than before. The Doctor and Rose both manage to grab onto the control panel for stability; Mickey, though, gets thrown to the floor again. He groans.

“Brace yourself!” The Doctor yells. “We’re going to crash!”

The Tardis begins spiraling uncontrollably through time and space. The blue light flickers one final time, then goes out for good. Clashing and crashing noises can be heard coming from inside the Tardis.

Mickey, Rose, and The Doctor all yell as the Tardis slams down in a crash-landing. All is dark and silent for several seconds.

Finally, The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver breaks the chilling quiet with a few of its signature noises, and then a dim yellow backup light comes on, illuminating the inside of the Tardis ominously. Despite their best efforts, we see that the three time travelers were unable to brace themselves sufficiently as the Tardis crashed down. They’ve been thrown far apart from each other, and lie on the ground once again.

Smoke begins to fill the room. Rose and Mickey appear worried, but The Doctor looks the most terrified of all.

“The time vortex is broken!” He shouts, and leaps to his feet almost instantly.  Rose and Mickey are both still on the ground. Both appear extremely disheveled with looks of pain across their faces.

The Doctor’s eyes are fixed on the control panel at first, but then fall on Rose, who looks back at him. The expression on her face doesn’t match his desperation, but instead, says something more like, “where are your manners?”

The Doctor quickly rushes over to her, and extends his right arm. Rose takes his hand, and he pulls her easily to her feet. In fact, he’s so anxious that he pulls with more strength than he intends to, and she flies up with a little extra jump in her step. As soon as she’s up, The Doctor looks in Mickey’s direction, sees that he’s OK, and then continues to focus on his own problem.

“The time vortex … _and_ the power cell … it’s …”

He paces the room for a moment, and then returns to the console. He strokes it lovingly, and there is clear concern in his voice.

“The power cell—it’s dead—or dying, at least. I’ve got to replace it …” Even his body language shows the intensity of his worry.

Mickey, still on the ground and looking quite ignored, is reluctant to get up after what happened last time, but finally staggers to his feet. “Well, at least we’ve landed, yeah?”

The Doctor doesn’t respond. Instead, he adjusts his glasses once more and brings his face right up to the gears and gadgets on the console, inspecting them very closely. He clicks his tongue three times, thinking to himself. In an aside, he murmurs, “It looks like this isn’t the first time … how did I miss this …?”

After several seconds, The Doctor finally speaks to the others. “What?” There is a considerable pause before he catches up. “Oh, right. Yes. Help. Good.  You go look for help, while I try to see what I can do here.” He pulls his glasses off his nose and slides them into his pocket once more.

Rose scrunches up her face in surprise. “What, me and Mickey, just go out there on our own? Without you?”

Mickey quickly chimes in, “We could be anywhere!” He rushes over to the doors of the Tardis. “Any time, any place.  Or nowhere!  No place!  It could be total darkness out there—”

“Nah,” The Doctor shakes his head knowingly. “I saw where we were headed when we got hit. That much of it, at least, makes a little bit of sense, if this has really happened several times before  in the way the controls are suggesting …” He trails off, and gives Mickey a nonchalant head-nod, suggesting that he open the Tardis doors.

Mickey pushes them open slowly, and sunlight pours into the Tardis.

************************************

In Quantico, Dr. Reid is walking down a busy sidewalk, parallel to a busy commercial street, on a busy afternoon. It’s the same day, in fact, that he woke up in the middle of a strange nightmare. The nightmare has left him with a splitting headache, which is apparent by the way he squints his eyes as he walks, grabbing at the side of his head with one hand every few seconds.

Now that he’s up and dressed, Reid looks tall, svelte, and handsome like a Calvin Klein model. He wears a light purple button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a simple dark purple skinny tie. Over this, he’s wearing a dark gray sweater, and has adorably placed a silver designer watch over the sleeve of his left hand.

Reid carries a tan leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder. It’s buttoned shut, but the spine of a red hard-back copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s _The Sign of the Four_ peeks out from the very top. As Reid walks, the bag bounces ever so slightly, and he grumbles to himself.

“Even in this day and age, it’s incredibly striking that a city of this size and population would only have one pay phone in its entire geographical area.”

He continues walking quite hurriedly with his head down. At first, this appears to be because of the headache he’s been suffering, but when he begins shading his eyes, it also seems like he’s trying to avoid making eye contact with any of the passersby on the street. Eventually, he slows down, and steps off the sidewalk into an abandoned parking lot.

Just a few feet away from him is a large, bright blue, London-style Police Box. A white plaque on the front reads:

_Police telephone: Free for use of Public. Advice & Assistance Obtainable Immediately. Officer & Cars Respond to all calls._

Reid finishes reading the sign out loud: “Pull to open.”

He looks around, completely confused.  However, no one in the crowd bustling down the sidewalk just a few feet away seems to even see the phone booth, let alone notice how out of place it is. Reid stammers and stutters for a few moments before getting any words out.

“But … this was just a normal phone booth on Sunday.  And … Police Boxes don’t exist in the United States.”

He takes a step closer, so that his face is just inches away from the door. For some reason, he turns his face sideways and places one hand on the door, as if trying to listen to what’s happening on the other side. He furrows his brow in thought, and then steps back again. He looks both ways tentatively, but still, no one is paying any attention.

Reid focuses on the words “Police Telephone” once more.

“Well, I am the federal government.” He half-smiles to himself, and reaches for the door handle slowly and dramatically.  He opens it very reluctantly … 

Suspense!

When the door opens, there’s just a normal pay phone inside.

“Huh.” Reid seems almost disappointed. Nonetheless, he steps inside and the door closes behind him. He surveys the small room, as well as the telephone. He removes the handset from the wall, and is surprised when he sees that there are indeed numbers on the phone, and a steady dial-tone echoing from the handset.

“So, it’s not a police box after all, but just a free pay phone?” he asks himself. He pauses to think for a moment, but then shrugs. There is something far more important on his mind: he gingerly types in a series of numbers, as if the sound of dialing each number creates a song that’s music to his ears.

A mysterious woman answers the phone: “Hello?”

During the woman’s lines, we cut to shots that only show her lips and an obscure portion of her face. Her identity and location remain completely hidden.

“Hi. I, um …” Reid sounds incredibly nervous at first, but his voice grows sweeter with each word. “I just thought I’d call.”

“Oh. You scared me!”

“Sorry.”

“I thought it was an emergency. Maybe one of your headaches gone wrong. How are you feeling?” The woman asks.

“Well, that’s part of it, unfortunately. The headaches are still …” He reaches up and wipes a small bead of sweat from his forehead. “They’re still pretty bad.”

The woman’s voice shows care and concern. “Are you taking your riboflavin and the magnesium?”

“In equal doses and a sporadic shot of B2.” Reid smiles. “Like you said.”

“And sleep? Are you letting your gray matter rest?

“That’s just it. What’s somehow made it worse. I’m … I’ve … I had the strangest nightmare.” Reid answers. “Well, nightmares, for several days, actually. But last night I had the strangest one of all … strange because it felt so real.”

“That shouldn’t be cause for alarm. You live a high-stress life—occasional or even frequent nightmares may not even be connected to your symptoms.”

“No, I—I don’t mean it felt _real_ , I mean it _felt_ real. I _felt_ the wind on my face, and even worse, I _felt_ so, I don’t know, emotionally hurt. I—” he hesitates for a moment, and then finishes his sentence tenderly and with a crack in his voice. Some tears try to surface in his eyes, though he fights them. “I felt like you were being taken away from me.”

There is a long pause. Reid shifts his weight in the phone booth nervously. When the woman doesn’t respond, he adds one final sentence: “I felt like … like I _saw_ you being taken away from me.”

The woman’s voice matches his in sweetness and concern. “Oh, Spencer. Please don’t cry.”

There is a long pause.  “I’m not—” he tries to deny it, but thinks better of it. “How can you tell that I’m about to cry?”

“I’m a good listener,” the woman answers, both sensitively and with a hint of flirtation. After a moment, she adds: “But how can you feel like you _saw_ me being taken away? You don’t know what I look like.”

Instead of responding in turn, this takes Reid’s mind somewhere else. “Do _you_ know what _I_ look like?” He starts fiddling with his thumbs nervously. “Because, you know, like one Google search of me and you’ll find my FBI file photo, and all my professional and academic history …”

He runs his hands through his hair, and then, shaking a little, straightens his tie as if she can see him.

“No, I don’t know what you look like.”

Reid’s eyes light up in surprise. “Really?”

“No. The only intimate part of you I’ve seen is your brain, when I studied that MRI you sent me. That’s when I said: ‘This is a guy I need to get to know.’”

Reid blushes, his voice lowering to a tender whisper.

“Thanks.” He pauses and smiles. “That’s really nice of you to say.”

Suddenly, a loud jiggling starts coming from outside the phone booth door. The handle is wiggling, as if someone who has been locked out is trying to get in.

Reid throws his hand to his forehead, as if remembering that he’s not supposed to be in this phone booth. “Shoot!” he exclaims. “Someone’s here.  I have to go.”

“Ok. Well, be safe,” the woman says. There is an unusual amount of heaviness in her words.

“Wait—” Reid is suddenly more alarmed by the woman’s advice than the sound that’s growing louder outside.  “Are _you_ being safe?”

The woman is clearly nervous, but trying not to show it. “Yes. Yes, I’m being safe.”

Reid hesitates, but has to ask. He speaks softly: “Do you think he knows about us?”

“No. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t.” She pauses. “And we need to keep it that way.”

The jiggling and wiggling ends, suddenly replaced by a hollow pounding on the other side of the door.

Reid hangs up, and turns to face the door to the phone booth just as it bursts open …

The Doctor stands directly in front of Reid, just a foot or two away. He is wearing the same suit as before, but has put a long light brown trench coat on top of it. His hair is also considerably less perfect after everything that happened in the Tardis, but a scientist is always fine. The Doctor remains in the doorway of the phone booth, looking almost excited.

“Well hello!” The Doctor exclaims. He takes a step closer, so that he’s standing right in front of Reid’s face. The Police Box is quite small, but somehow—as if it could change its shape—it feels a bit bigger when The Doctor steps inside. There’s suddenly room for both of them. The two men are exactly the same height, and look each other eye-to-eye just inches apart.

There is genuine curiosity written all over The Doctor’s face. “So it’s you who keep stepping into my world, getting all wrapped up in my Tardis,” he says playfully, and shakes his head. “But looky-here! _I’ve_ just stepped into _yours_.”

************************************

**** Cue “Doctor Spencer Who”[theme song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsMvM7rEECI) ****

As the episode fades in, Spencer Reid recites the show’s opening epigraph in a quiet, yet sultry voice:

_And all in war with Time for love of you,_

_as he takes from you, I ingraft you new._

_William Shakespeare._

************************************

Reid doesn’t waste any time with questions. He takes a large step back, reaches across his belt, and grabs the gun that he keeps, as usual, in appendix carry.

“Federal agent. Don’t move.” He says urgently.

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Hold on! Just a minute!” The Doctor cries, and holds both of his hands up in the air.

Reid’s practiced police professionalism immediately gives way to his true anxiety about the situation. “Who are you? If you’re her stalker, I swear—” He attempts to be threatening, but is not successful. His voice grows less severe and more impassioned with every word. “I swear, I’ll—”

The Doctor assumes a soothing tone and begins to coax Reid. “Calm down. It’s all right. My name’s The Doctor, and I’m here about those … experiences … you’ve been having …”

Reid narrows his gaze at The Doctor suspiciously, but there’s some spark of relief in his eyes.

“I don’t know who you’re afraid that I am, but I’m not them.  I’m just here for you. I’m a … specialist, you could say, in, well, in—” The Doctor pauses with uncertainty, once again looking up and away in thought. “How’ve you been feeling it, then? Headaches? Waking dreams? Feel a bit like a … walking _zombie_ sometimes?”

“What? How did you— Who told you?”

“Well,” The Doctor shrugs and wrinkles his lower lip, “you did, I guess you could say.”

They look at each other dead in the eye for several seconds. The Doctor raises his eyebrows excitedly, but Reid is deep in thought, and won’t break his serious gaze.

“Go on. Keep looking me in the eye,” says the Doctor. “I can see it. You trust me.”

Reid slowly, inexplicably begins to lower his gun.

“Yes,” The Doctor continues. “Yes you do.”

“So, just saying hypothetically that I do trust you—which I don’t, necessarily,” Reid begins. His first sentence is quick, almost bantering, but he continues with greater hesitation. “What am I … trusting you to do, exactly?” As Reid finishes the question, he resolutely places the gun back into the holster over his side.

“Good question. See, it’s not just you who’ve got to trust me, but I’ve got to figure out who you are. Because you and I, we’ve got a bit of a problem,” The Doctor explains.

“What?”

“Well, the reason you’ve been feeling a bit …” he pauses momentarily to make a wiggling gesture with his hands, “… weird … is because you’ve somehow got yourself tangled up in my ship.”

“Your what?” Reid’s trust and belief is quickly waning.

“Look around you,” The Doctor smiles.

Reid looks to the left, then to the right. The two men are still in an oddly spacious, yet at the same time relatively cramped, bright blue phone booth. However, The Doctor makes a “turn round” gesture with his finger, and Reid instinctively obliges.

We pan around from Reid’s point of view. As he turns past the black pay phone on the wall, shifting his gaze to the space directly behind him, it suddenly becomes a massive, futuristic looking room: the interior of the Tardis. Interestingly, the illuminated blue cylinder that’s connected to the time vortex is fully functional at this particular moment, and Rose and Mickey are nowhere to be seen.

“I … I must be … ” Reid is completely speechless. His soft brown eyes dart around the room frantically, searching for some logical explanation.

“Interesting thing is, though,” The Doctor continues, as if Reid isn’t as completely dazed and confused as he currently is, “that I’m not just _entangled_ with you … This whole thing also has something to do with a—”

************************************

In London, Mickey steps out of the Tardis.“A parallel world!” he exclaims, as he looks up into the sky. He and Rose are indisputably in present-day London, except that large silver zeppelins are drifting through the sky.

“What, really?” Rose asks, a look of childlike wonder on her face. She smiles.

“You’ve seen it on films. Like an alternative to our world, where everything’s the same but a little bit different,” Mickey exclaims. “They’ve got zeppelins! It’s—”

************************************

In Quantico, The Doctor continues his conversation with Reid in the Tardis.

“Brilliant! This is different than anything I’ve ever encountered before,” The Doctor explains. “So I have to ask: what are you?”

The Doctor tilts his head a little to the left, and narrows his eyes at Reid in thought. He removes his sonic screwdriver from his jacket pocket, and, completely unannounced, shines it in Reid’s face. The blue light blares in Reid’s eyes as the screwdriver makes its instantly recognizable noise.

Reid has no verbal response. He blinks twice while The Doctor looks to his screwdriver expectantly.

“Human?” The Doctor announces loudly, and full of surprise.

We pan around, shifting from Reid’s point of view into The Doctor’s. As we do so, the interior of the Tardis suddenly transitions into a normal Police Box again.

“Really?” The Doctor is still in utter disbelief about Reid’s identity, and seems not to have noticed the bigger change around him.

Reid has noticed the shift in the environment as well. Suddenly, he reaches up, and slaps himself lightly in the face. His nimble hands make a perceptible sound against his perfectly chiseled cheek bones, and he flinches in response.

“What are you doing?” The Doctor asks. “We’ve got work to do, you and me. Got to get us _un-entangled_.”

“Did you see—are you—” Reid gestures to the once again small room around him.

“Oh, yes,” The Doctor says casually, and as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s been doing that all morning. That’s what happens when your Tardis is trying to be in two places _and_ two _states_ all at once.”

As The Doctor is speaking, Reid takes a small step closer to him and slowly reaches out his hand, which he very, very slowly extends toward The Doctor’s shoulder. Just as The Doctor finishes his sentence, Reid hesitantly taps the front of The Doctor’s brown jacket, which, of course, is solid matter. The Doctor lowers his head, looking down at Reid’s hand on his shoulder, and raises his eyebrow. Then, without moving, he simply looks up toward Reid just a bit with his deep brown eyes.

“You’re real,” Reid whispers.

“Of course I’m real!” The Doctor pats Reid’s hand, which Reid quickly, almost embarrassedly, removes. “Now, let’s get on with things. I told you my name. Who are you?”

Reid is regaining his usual quick-witted manner as he attempts to navigate the bizarre situation. “Actually, you told me that you’re The Doctor. You didn’t say your name.” He crosses his arms. “You’re a doctor … a specialist of something weird, or, I guess, things that are weird. Doctor …” Reid appears to be thinking rapidly within his own mind. “Doctor _of what_?” He stops to rub his forehead with his hand for a moment. Then, he makes a quick aside to himself: “Something about that question feels _really_ familiar, but not quite right, like it’s just a little too fuzzy …”

The Doctor gives Reid a second to think before he responds. “I’m The Doctor of, well, time, space … it’s not important.” Then, following Reid’s example, he makes his own aside: “It’s funny, no one ever asks me that.”

“OK, fine. You’re The Doctor. And I’m a doctor too. Spencer Reid, FBI. Behavioral Analysis Unit.”

Reid looks down to The Doctor’s hand, as if considering whether or not he’ll reach out to shake it, when suddenly, a phone rings. It’s not the phone on the wall, though; it’s Reid’s cell phone. He holds up his index finger to The Doctor in the universal “one minute” gesture, and begins digging through his messenger bag. As he does so, his copy of _The Sign of the Four_ tumbles to the floor. He is so discombobulated, however, that he seems not to notice. On the fourth and final ring of the phone, he retrieves it triumphantly, and brings it to his ear.

“Yes, Garcia?” He asks. Reid’s voice is all business, and a look of deep concentration fills his eyes as he listens to the phone call. After a few seconds, he says a quick “thanks,” and hangs up.

“I’ve—I have to go. We have a case.”

“Really? After all that? Just—?” The Doctor objects.

“Sorry. Gotta go,” Reid repeats and shakes his head. He turns sideways, brushing past The Doctor to escape the narrow doorway. Their two handsome faces are painfully close for just an instant as Reid squeezes by, but he avoids looking up at The Doctor. He rushes out of the Police Box, and as soon as he leaves, he’s back on a completely ordinary, pedestrian Quantico street. He walks hurriedly, and with purpose, back in the direction that he initially came.

“I need to get another MRI …” he mutters to himself, shaking his head in complete disbelief.

************************************

“Well, my friends, pack a bag for New Mexico and phone up the mad Doctor because we have ourselves a vivisector,” Garcia says to the team, waving the clicker in her hands toward the TV screen behind her.

The team is assembled in the BAU Headquarters briefing room. Reid is sitting at the long wooden table between Morgan (who looks like the world’s tastiest chocolate bar, and smells like a forest and dreams) and JJ (who’s beautiful—radiant even), looking tired and lost in thought. He is resting his chin in his hands, looking as if he’s just about to drift off, when he suddenly sits straight up at Garcia’s words.

“What?” he exclaims in surprise, then stammers out: “The Doctor?”

“Oh come on, you didn’t get that one?” Garcia feigns a look of hurt, and tosses one of her bright blonde curls behind her shoulder. This calls attention to the bright blue sweater she’s wearing over a bright blue floral print dress, with matching bright blue hair flower and bright blue glasses. On anyone else, it would be an excessive amount of blue.

Garcia continues. “Doctor Moreau, as in, Island of.” She pauses with a look of expectation after each two-word phrase. “Good book. Many movies. Very Victorian.”

Morgan, however, sees that it’s not about Garcia’s cultural reference. He snaps his fingers in front of Reid’s face. “Wake up, pretty boy,” he jokes. Then he adds more seriously, “We need you with it on this.”

“Sorry, I just—” Reid begins an explanation, but then looks down at the table nervously. “Never mind. You were saying?”

“Our unsub _du jour_ is taking right legs. The most recent victim,” she gestures to the TV monitor behind her, which displays a picture of a young African American man, “Tony Anders. Dumped at a local motel. He’s in surgery now—looks like he’s gonna pull through.”

Reid scrunches his eyebrows at the image on the screen.

Garcia shudders, then continues. “But the first victim? Not so lucky. Richard Hubbel died during the leg absconding process, and his body was dumped just over the border in Juarez, Mexico.”

Morgan, JJ, and Reid all thumb through manila folders, presumably full of grisly details about the case, as Garcia speaks.

JJ comments first: “Tony Anders had IV bruising and surgical sutures … that means the unsub was operating on his victims—or at least, trying to.”

Reid gets a faraway look in his eyes. He turns to face Garcia, but doesn’t actually meet her gaze. He whispers quietly. “So we _are_ looking at a doctor.”

The team reacts more to Reid’s words than his strange delivery.

“That’s a first. Were they patients anywhere? Being treated for anything?” JJ asks.

“No. They were the vision of health,” Garcia responds.

“Were the operations done expertly enough to have been performed at a hospital?” Morgan suggests. “The unsub could have drugged the victims and brought them in for surgery.”

Reid still isn’t looking at anyone. His eyes are moving rapidly in thought, back and forth, as if he’s reading a book, or doing a long, complicated math problem in his head.

“He couldn’t hide in a hospital.” Reid pauses for a moment, and it’s clear that the rest of the team is going to give him the floor. He opens his manila envelope to a particular page, then slaps down his index finger on a line of the medical report. “The goal of amputation is to remove dead tissue to preserve an otherwise healthy limb. Any first-year medical student will tell you that. But this unsub stitched the skin flap so tightly over Tony’s amputation that he developed gangrene.”

“So … he’s not a doctor?” Morgan responds.

“… or a specialist …” Reid mutters under his breath so quietly that the others don’t hear. He unexpectedly rises up to his feet. As soon as he stands, however, he bends over the table just enough to rest his hands on it, and put his head down.

JJ looks worried. “What’s wrong, Reid?”

Morgan shares her sentiment. “You OK, kid?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s, uh—” Reid removes one hand from the table and massages his temple.

We get a sudden, extreme close-up of Reid’s face. In the background, we hear a high-pitched ringing that is horribly overwhelming—albeit only to him.

“It’s a head rush. I just need to go splash some water on my face—” Reid rights himself more vertically, and points toward the door of the briefing room.

The team is quiet for a moment, but then they decide to continue discussing the case.

“So, the first body was dumped in Juarez,” Morgan reiterates. “That’s a cartel city. Any known drug connections among the victims?”

Morgan’s words slowly fade to background noise as Reid exits the room and makes it into the BAU hallway. He walks down the corridor toward the bathroom, eyes fixed on his own black Converse All Stars as he takes shaky step after shaky step.

We watch the scene unfold from Reid’s point of view. His eyes remain on his feet, then shift to his hand. He’s still wearing his watch cutely over his cardigan sleeve as he reaches right toward the blue triangle sign on the door, with its generic stick figure and the word “Men.”

As the door pushes open and into the room, we hear the high-pitched ringing sound again. Instead of seeing the men’s bathroom behind the door, everything is filled with a bright white light.

In the middle of his stride into the bathroom, Reid squints his eyes anxiously and reaches his other arm out as if to steady himself. The light fades, and Reid cautiously opens his eyes again. We follow his gaze as he pans around the room.

“It can’t be!” he worries out loud.

Reid is inside the Tardis once more. The futuristic teal and orange room extends all around him, larger than any men’s bathroom that could be situated in this space. The control panel is lit in the center of the room, and other machine parts and gears are moving and shifting.

Also, of course, The Doctor is standing right in front of him. He’s crossing one foot over the other, and has one hand on the sonic screwdriver in his jacket pocket.

“Hello again!” The Doctor quips. “D’j’you miss me?”

Reid puts on a completely emotionless face. “Yes I did, actually. Two people have been horribly maimed by somebody who _thinks_ he’s a doctor.”

“That’s terrible!” The Doctor shows some sympathy, but doesn’t oversell his feelings.

“Yes, it is.” Reid agrees, unflinching.

After a tense, several-second pause, The Doctor gets it. “What, you think it’s me?” He points to himself in the chest. “That’s ridiculous!” He un-crosses his foot and begins to pace back and forth. “But you said this happened in New Mexico!”

“It did. But you and this—” Reid gestures at the Tardis around him. “This _ship_ , were at the phone booth earlier today, saying something about being two places at once … and now you’ve transported the whole thing into the men’s bathroom at the BAU. A building, by the way, that’s architecturally constructed to resemble a fortress and has some of the best security systems in the world. Apparently, anything’s possible.”

“Yes!” The Doctor stops pacing and looks to Reid excitedly. “Exactly! You’re starting to believe it, aren’t you? I can travel through space, and you know it. And I am real, you already tested _that_.” A playful smirk sneaks onto his face. “And, by the way, I looked you up while you were gone, and now I know something _else_ you’ll get, 187.” He uses Reid’s IQ, in jest, as a form of address.

Reid doesn’t miss a bit. “All right. What’s that?”

“Got your doctorate in mathematics at sixteen, eh? Got another one in chemistry _and_ another in engineering? You, of all people, understand quantum entanglement.”

Reid can’t help but take the bait. “The principal of locality states that an object is only directly influenced by its immediate surroundings; for one action to have influence at another point, something in the space between the two points must mediate the action.” He gets more and more excited as he speaks, and a glimmer of recognition is visible in his body language. “But with entangled particles ...” he slows down, “one can affect the other with no influence between the two.”

As he finishes his last few words, he speaks in a way that shows some understanding.

“Couldn’t’ve said it better myself!” The Doctor declares and claps his hands. “Told you we were entangled.”

“Causality I understand: the things you’re doing are affecting me, and what I do affects you … But it doesn’t explain everything. It’s _almost_ like you’re in two places at once, at least comparatively or metaphorically.” Reid puts one finger to his chin. “But it’s not. That’s not how it works.”

“Not for normal things, no. But when you’ve got the ability to travel through space and time, things get … well, a little messy.”

“So you _are_ in two places at once?” Reid doesn’t seem to fully grasp The Doctor’s point.

“Of course not.” The Doctor shakes his head. He pauses briefly, then clarifies. “We both are.”

“But—” Reid needs a moment to process this information. “How is that possible? Shouldn’t you be dead? Shouldn’t _I_ be dead?”

The Doctor purses his lips. “Not me, no. You? Probably. But you’re not. That’s good!” He takes a few steps closer to Reid, then clasps him firmly on the shoulder as if in congratulation. “Good for you, and good for me. I’ll help you with whatever _ailments_ that’ve been paining you lately, thanks to all this quantum wobbliness, and meanwhile, you can help me get free of you and go back to normal. Well, as normal as things get.”

Reid is about to reply, but his phone chirps with a new text message. He reaches into his pocket and reads it. The message is from Garcia: “Wheels up in 30.”

Reid looks down at the phone in his hands, then up to The Doctor. Their eyes meet with great intensity. Then Reid looks down at his phone again, contemplating a difficult decision.

“I … I guess I can help you,” he begins, though his tone of voice reveals that this decision is a surprise even to himself. “But I still have to solve this case. People are in trouble, and it’s my job to help them.”

“Funny thing, that,” says The Doctor, flicking his head over his shoulder to gesture towards the door that was, just a few minutes ago, the entrance to the BAU’s men’s bathroom. “Helping people is my job too.”

“What? No—you can’t come with me, quantum physics or no,” Reid shakes his head disapprovingly. “There are—are security risks and legal restrictions and—there’s no way anyone on the BAU Team would understand or believe—”

“I can’t come like _this_ ,” The Doctor interrupts. “But I can’t _not_ come.”

The Doctor seems like he’s going to say more, when without warning, the room around them begins pulsing in and out of existence, as if flickering out like the Tardis control panel did earlier. “Oh!” he exclaims with frustration. “Unfortunately, I don’t have much control over when and how I follow you. So … I think I’ll meet you there?”

As he finishes speaking, the Tardis finishes disappearing around them. As if it never happened, The Doctor and Tardis interior are gone, and Reid stands alone in the bathroom.

He looks at himself in the mirror and opens his sparkling eyes wide. Then, he takes a step towards the sink, turns it on, and splashes his face.

************************************

**Title overlay: ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO**

Reid is in the Albuquerque morgue. He stands near an operating table in the middle of a small, square room, where trays of bloody tools make it clear that an autopsy has just taken place. The medical examiner, a small brunette woman, stands next to him.

“Take all the time you need, Doctor,” she says to Reid, and hands him a clipboard of notes. “I have another autopsy to tend to, but you can call me down if you have questions.” With that, she steps outside of the room.

Reid is still wearing the same purple clothes from before, but has rolled up his sleeves as high as possible, and pulled blue medical gloves over his hands. He studies the clipboard for a moment.

“This operation is transtibial, but the survivor is transfemeral,” Reid says aloud.

He puts the clipboard down on a nearby metal desk and steps closer to the table. He inhales to prepare himself, then tosses back the white sheet on the operating table, which reveals the first victim’s body. We see that the male victim’s leg has been amputated below the knee.

“But Tony’s was cut above…” Reid bends over to examine the severed leg, focusing on the skin around the amputation. “The cutting here is pristine, nerve and vascular dissection is careful and well-ligated … this unsub knows what he’s doing medically.”

Reid goes in for a closer look, and as he does, we’re brought extremely close up of his face. He winces suddenly, and the high-pitched ringing returns for a glaring instant. Reid staggers back from the table and closes his eyes.

When he opens them, everything is the same as before, except that The Doctor is standing on the opposite side of the operating table. The Doctor looks from side to side frantically, then sticks out his arms in several directions as if imitating a mime in a box.

“No Tardis this time?!” he asks to himself, before realizing …

“Ahh!” he shrieks as his eyes fall on the body in front of him. “What are you doing?”

“I’m helping stop a serial killer,” Reid answers, but then grows irritated. Examining the body is his number one priority. “I told you not to come with me! I’ll—I’ll help you later.” He looks back down at the victim’s leg.

The Doctor puts his hands down and tries to relax. “I can’t help it, Spencer—” he begins, shaking his head.

Reid instantly looks up from the body and glares. “It’s _Doctor_ ,” he chides.

“You can’t be the doctor! I’m The Doctor. It’s—”

“Fine.” Reid goes back to work. “Then at least call me Reid. And don’t distract me from what I’m doing. It’s important.”

“ _Reid_ ,” The Doctor extends his name apologetically. “I told you, I can’t help it, and it’s getting worse. See, my companion’s actually caught in a parallel universe at the moment … and she found a small power cell to recharge, but I can’t seem to control or predict what’s happening with the time vortex …” he trails off, his voice growing both serious and tender. Then he adds: “and disappearing or reappearing is one thing, but it’s not a good sign that I just showed up here _entirely_ sans Tardis …”

Reid sighs and keeps his eyes on the body. “I’m a genius and I can only understand half of what you’re saying. What am I supposed to do?”

“ _Doctor_!” The Doctor pleads, the word so often used to describe him sounds strange in his own voice. “Did you hear me? My companion, my friend—I might be separated from her _forever_ if I can’t get you un-entangled from my ship! _That’s_ what we have to do!”

Reid stops, stock-still, and looks up. “Separated forever …” he repeats under his breath. He doesn’t think The Doctor hears him, but he does.

“Yes, separated forever,” The Doctor’s voice is desperate. “Can you possibly understand what that means?”

“It can’t be … but what do I …” Reid is putting the pieces together in his mind, looking up and to the side, his mouth slightly ajar, in the same way The Doctor often does.

A few more seconds pass as Reid struggles to reach a conclusion. Finally, and seemingly out of nowhere, he exclaims begrudgingly: “All right!”

“All right, what?” The Doctor is puzzled.

“You need me to help you? OK. I’ll try—”

Before he’s even finished, The Doctor grins from ear to ear.

“ _But_ ,” Reid qualifies his offer. “I can’t just leave here. I can’t stop what I’m doing and let a killer roam free. I’ll help you, and you already said you’ll help me. So, you’re a doctor. Help me with _this_.” Reid nods toward the operating table.

“Help you do _actual_ police work … and examine a dead person?” The Doctor raises an eyebrow.

“Yes. It’s—”

Reid is interrupted by The Doctor taking such a deep breath that it’s loud enough to be heard over his sentence. The Doctor slowly exhales, then steps up toward the body.

He pulls his sonic screwdriver out of his jacket pocket, and uses it to examine the man’s leg wounds. As he does so, he grimaces, but the look on his face is one of a small ‘eureka!’ moment.

“The hole in this bone,” The Doctor summons Reid with a ‘come here’ finger movement. “Here. It’s perfectly circular.”

“The medical examiner said that was most likely caused by animals.”

“Not any animals on this planet,” The Doctor says with complete seriousness. “It’s bored in.”

Reid narrows his eyes, and sees exactly what The Doctor means. “It’s like he drilled it,” Reid agrees.

“So, why’s he doing this? What’s he want?”

“You just found out,” Reid says gravely. “Amputating the leg isn’t his goal—reattaching it is.”

“What, reattaching the leg he just took off? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Reid shakes his head slowly. “No, it doesn’t. He wants to see if he can put a foreign leg on someone else’s body.”

“Really?” The Doctor looks extremely surprised. “That’s not—possible, on this—I mean, right here, right now … is it?”

“No, no. It’s medically impossible, in fact. You can’t graft a leg onto someone else’s stump.”

“Do you think he knows that?”

“If he’s a scientist, yes.” Reid looks at The Doctor triumphantly as all the evidence falls into place. “Yet, he can’t admit that he’s wrong. He’s insistent, he’s _determined_ , to make the impossible happen. That means he won’t stop until …” Reid trails off in recognition. “I think I understand the profile. And we need to get it out to the public before the unsub takes another victim.”

Reid takes off his medical gloves and turns away from The Doctor and the autopsy table. He reaches into his pocket for his cell phone, but as he does, The Doctor calls out, extending the one syllable of Reid’s name quite impressively: “ _Reid!_ ”

Reid whips around, only to see The Doctor flickering out of existence again. After a few brief seconds, he’s gone. Reid’s eyes soften with concern, but nonetheless, he gets his cell phone out and calls the team.

************************************

At an Albuquerque P.D. Press Conference, JJ stands in front of the news camera and releases the following information:

_“The unsub we’re looking for is a doctor with a severe God complex. His narcissism makes him believe that he can defy human biology and anatomy, but has also likely caused problems in his career. So, look for doctors who’ve lost their licenses or medical students who’ve had ethical violations. He’s probably successful, respectful, outgoing._

_“He can maintain healthy relationships, and his neighbors probably know him well. He lives a mid- to upper-class lifestyle, and may be married or have kids. If so, he’s fiercely devoted to both. We believe he’s experimenting with limb amputation and reattachment in order to eventually perform this operation on someone he knows and loves.”_

************************************

In an FBI SUV, Morgan and Reid are en-route to investigate a possible suspect when Morgan’s phone rings.

“You’re on speaker, baby girl,” Morgan says with a silky twang as he drives the car and answers the call.

“Wunderkind’s profile did the trick. We’ve just pinged a possible unsub—John Nelson. Quit his job at the funeral home two months ago. And get this: his wife has a leg deformity caused by complications due to chicken pox.”

“Garcia—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sending the home address to your GPS now.”

************************************

Morgan and Reid arrive at the unsub’s home in a manner of minutes. Breaks squealing, Morgan whips the SUV into the ubsub’s driveway. He and Reid bail out of the car and approach the modest, middle-class home.

“You watch the back! I’m going in through the front!” Morgan orders, and points emphatically around the side of the home. No time to lose, Reid obeys.

We hear the sound of Morgan kicking down the door as Reid rushes in the opposite direction, gun drawn. Putting his back to the side of the house, he cautiously approaches a back window. Right as he works up the courage to carefully look inside it, he grabs his forehead with one hand. Realizing what’s about to happen, he puts his other hand over his mouth to keep from crying out.

At that moment, The Doctor appears on the other side of the window, his back conveniently against the wall of the home just as Reid’s is. The Doctor looks around frantically.

Reid literally facepalms. “Watch out!” he hisses. “We’ve identified our suspect and we’re literally going in after him right now. If you say a _word_ you could get us both killed!”

The Doctor puts one finger over his lips in agreement, but at that very moment, a woman’s scream pierces the air. It’s coming from the nearby garage.

The Doctor perks up like a dog that’s just heard the word “W-A-L-K.” Without warning or explanation, he rushes in the direction of the scream.

Reid groans audibly. He jumps away from the wall for a moment, but then hesitates, considering the safest thing to do: he has both Morgan and The Doctor to look out for. After several uneasy seconds, he decides that he has to follow The Doctor, and rushes after him.

As Reid comes around the corner, we hear a few quick pulses of the sonic screwdriver, but The Doctor is nowhere in sight … until his head emerges from the high, narrow front window of the garage. He starts wriggling out in escape. Reid rushes to his aid and pulls him the rest of the way.

Just as The Doctor tumbles head-first toward the ground, we hear Morgan yelling at the unsub from just one room away. “FBI! Don’t move!”

Reid leaps toward the garage window and draws his gun, ready to cover Morgan from behind. Morgan and the unsub are clearly on the other side of the garage, as if Morgan caught him when he was about to enter, but Reid remains poised and ready.

Inside the garage, a woman—presumably the unsub’s next almost-victim, hides behind a tipped-over operating table, her eyes carefully fixed on the door between the garage and the rest of the house. We see a set of handcuffs attached to it, and bruising around the woman’s wrists; yet somehow, the handcuffs have been unlocked, and now dangle wide-open.

“What were you thinking?” Reid whisper-shouts to The Doctor, while continuing to cover the garage with his gun.

“I told you I’d help you,” The Doctor says without concern. “And I told you that helping _people_ is what I do.”

Reid is completely silent in frustration.

“She won’t remember me, if that’s what you’re wondering,” The Doctor tries to mend the situation. “That criminal—un … sub … whatever—obviously anesthetized her, and you know that gives you amnesia …” The Doctor trails off, as if fighting the urge to go on a tangent. He gets himself back on track. “Though he hadn’t quite got her unconscious yet. He was reaching for another needle, when your partner distracted him and he went to investigate. While he was away, I just …” The Doctor makes a swimming gesture with his hands. “Just slipped in through the window and un-did her cuffs. Did it so sneaky-like she didn’t even realize it until I’d left.”

“What was that supposed to accomplish?” Reid demands. “If you really wanted to save her, which you _shouldn’t have been doing_ , shouldn’t you have taken her out of the window with you?”

“I wanted to, but when I realized that your partner had caught him … and I knew he was doing it with … _guns_ … and everything … I realized it’s quite a different kind of helping people than I’m used to.”

Reid frowns, but their conversation is interrupted by Morgan’s voice.

“I’ve got him in custody, Reid!” Morgan shouts from within the house.

“I’ll be right there,” Reid yells back over to Morgan. He lowers his gun from the window, and begins walking toward the front door.

We approach the front door from Reid’s point of view, listening to the sounds of The Doctor’s footsteps following cautiously behind. Mid-step, however, the sounds suddenly stop coming.

Reid turns around, and The Doctor has vanished once again.

************************************

On their way back from the scene of the take-down, Morgan and Reid chat in the FBI SUV.

“Good work today,” Morgan, sitting confidently behind the wheel, glances over to Reid and gives him an approving head nod. “You puzzled out that unsub _fast_.”

Reid is lost in thought. He looks worried and distracted, as he squints his eyes several times in exaggerated blinking. The sound of The Doctor’s words from earlier echoes through his mind: _I might be separated from her forever if I can’t get you un-entangled from my ship._ Reid holds his breath for a moment and appears to be in great emotional pain—he isn’t crying, but he looks like he might. _Separated forever. Can you possibly understand what that means_?

“Hey.” Morgan, eyes on the road, reaches over and shoves Reid playfully. “Hey kid. You _sure_ you’re OK? You’ve been high and low all day. Like you can’t make up your mind about something.”

“I … I think I need to call someone.”

“That’s fine. Go ahead,” Morgan invites.

“Well, I … um … ”

“You want me to pull over?”

“Kind of? Not exactly.”

“Who’ you calling?” Morgan waits for a moment, then flashes his perfectly white smile as if he’s incredibly proud of Reid.

“If you’ve got somebody new in your life to talk to, you know you don’t have to keep it a secret from me.”

Reid starts shifting in his seat.

“I’m not gonna push you, I’m just saying I’d like to know who she is. She’s gotta be one hell of a woman to keep up with you.” Morgan shakes his head side to side with mixed approval and a bit of disbelief, still beaming.

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Reid covers quickly. “It’s a … really personal … medical condition …” he stammers. “And I’d prefer there’s no record of me talking about it.”

Without looking over to Morgan at all, Reid picks up his cell phone. Morgan looks excited for a moment, but then Reid reveals who he’s actually calling. “Hey Garcia! Could you direct me and Morgan to the nearest pay phone?”

As the scene fades out, we hear Morgan encouraging Reid. “Play on,” he says, and we can hear from his tone of voice that he’s still beaming.

************************************

Reid and Morgan pull up to a dilapidated old grocery store that has seen better days. The parking lot is completely empty, and lit by only one flickering street lamp that stands over a very old pay phone. It’s not a booth or anything fancy—just a standalone pole with a single black phone and a scratched up protective cover. There’s a dangling chain where a phone book used to be attached to the stand, but the phone book itself long gone.

Once the pay phone is within view, Reid breathes an audible sigh of relief when he sees that it’s not a police box.

As they loom closer, however, Reid suddenly calls out to Morgan. “Stop, stop,” he orders, putting his hand out to the side like a mom when she slams on the brakes. “Stop here, park on the other side of the street, and wait _in the car_ until I’m done. OK?”

“You’re the boss … playa,” Morgan agrees, and raises his eyebrows in approval. He follow Reid’s instructions, and once they’ve parked, Reid hurries out of the car.

He walks up to the phone, uneasily looking both ways before picking it up. Then, with the same precision and sensitivity as before, he types in the number that he doesn’t need an eidetic memory to know by heart.

“Hello?” the woman answers the phone.

“Hi,” Reid says, his entire expression softening in response to her. “I’ve … I’ve been thinking of you all day.”

“I know,” she replies.

“You do?”

“Because I’ve been thinking of you all day, too.”

Reid’s face shows all the heightened emotion of a Romantic poet, manifesting in complete reverie.

“You know,” he begins coyly, “if we think of each other so much, maybe we could try, you know, talking more often.”

The pause is only for a millisecond, but Reid immediately senses some discomfort. “Or, or not. That’s OK too.”

“I’m sorry. I have to go,” the woman says. Her apology sounds genuine, but still concerns Reid greatly.

“Why? Did I—did I says something wrong?”

“I, um, I’m just not sure if it’s safe for us to talk right now.”

“Do you think it’s going to be like this … forever?” Reid asks, and as the last word falls from his lips, it strikes him with gravity and double meaning.

“I don’t know. But I promise, I—I don’t want it to be like this.”

“I know. And that’s why—” Reid hesitates. “My team and I are really good at what we do. Why can’t you let me help you?”

“That’s not fair, Spencer. You don’t get to—”

“I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing this for you, because I won’t let him hurt you, because I—”

“Don’t you understand?” The woman asks, her voice breaking with tears. “That’s exactly what I’m doing for you. If he knew, he would … he would …”

Reid hangs, emotionally, on her every word.

“OK. I understand. Please, just, please. Please don’t cry,” he is sincerely apologetic, and pleads with her in his eyes even though she can’t see him.

They are both silent for a moment in mutual understanding.

“Are you still there?” Reid asks hopefully.

“Yes. But I do think I should go. I’ll talk to you next Sunday.”

“All right.” Reid purses his lips. “I’ll be thinking of you until then. And—and I’m here for you if you do need me. For anything.” There is a long silence on the other end, so Reid closes out the conversation himself: “OK, well, bye.”

“Bye,” the woman repeats, but then adds unexpectedly, “Love you.” She hangs up the phone before Reid even has a chance to reply.

For a moment, Reid looks shocked and confused, but as it sinks in, this melts into a look of being completely smitten. He takes a step back, then holds the phone over his heart and closes his eyes before finally hanging up.

As the phone clicks back into place, he looks down at the dangling chain of the pay phone. Instead of being empty as it was before, though, Reid’s copy of _The Sign of the Four_ is dangling from it.

“What the …” Reid asks. He reaches toward the book, but right as he’s about to touch it, it disappears from existence.

************************************

Late that same night, Reid is finally back at his apartment after his trip to New Mexico. He is exhausted and breathes heavily in relief as he enters his bedroom. He has already taken off his watch and cardigan, and the long plane ride and even longer day seem to have taken a toll on his put-togetherness. He tosses his leather messenger bag onto his bed, then turns to face a full-length mirror against the wall near his closet. There is an open space between his closet and his bed, allowing him to stand comfortably in front of the mirror at various distances to ensure that he always pulls off that “pretty boy” look.

Reid sighs an additional time at the sight of his own reflection. His tie is already falling loose around the neck, and now he begins to take it off, slowly pulling at each loop so that he can carefully remove it without the slightest wrinkle. Once he’s taken off the tie, he opens up the sliding closet doors, where his wardrobe is neatly organized. First a group of cardigans, then a group of button-downs, then a rack of ties, and finally a rack of scarves, all hang in perfect order. Within each group, individual items are sorted meticulously in order of colors of the rainbow, starting from red, orange, and yellow, to a group of white, then green, blue, purple, and black and gray. Reid reaches to the far right of the closet to hang up the dark purple tie among a group of other similarly colored neckwear.

Then, he steps back from the closet and pulls lightly on the sleeves of his lilac purple button-down, un-rolling the careful folds that have become increasingly uneven throughout the day. After this, he methodically unbuttons the shirt, reaching each closure at an even pace, so that his shirt begins to open up at a slow yet steady pace. Eventually, he slinks his arms out of the sleeves, and crumples it up into one hand. Thin though he is, his pecs and shoulders are smooth with some muscles in the exact right places, which highlight his just so slightly inverted triangle figure, and give an almost hydrodynamic shape to his bare chest. He steps forward toward the closet for a moment, but then remembers something that brings the smallest, sweetest smile to his face.

“She loves me …” he whispers to himself, and he closes his eyes like a stereotypical teenager swooning at the very thought. “She …”

Without warning, however, the happiness on his face drops, and with it, he drops his dirty shirt to the ground. He’s realized something worrisome, and he rushes toward the bed. Frantically, he reaches over to his messenger bag and sprawls it open in front of him. The small muscles in his forearm, acutely developed from reading, typing, and generally being man-shaped, clench slightly as he ruffles through the bag. His motions are urgent, as he futilely looks for something that isn’t there. Nonetheless, in one last effort, he dumps the whole thing upside-down. His wallet and several good-quality writing pens scatter across the scarlet comforter.

“Where did my … how did it …?” he mutters to himself.

His eyes are cast down on the empty bag in despair, revealing an expression of severe emotional distress. He’s so preoccupied with his loss that he doesn’t notice the real source of the droning ache in his head … which is the same reason that the distressed steel lamp in his bedroom begins to flicker.

“Looking for this?” The Doctor has suddenly appeared in Reid’s bedroom, and his unmistakable Estuary English breaks the still silence in the room. Wearing the same full ensemble we saw earlier, The Doctor has his dress shirt and tie, brown pinstripe suit, and tan trench coat habitually layered one an top of the other. The coat falls almost all the way to his ankles, dramatically accentuating his tall body.

More importantly, The Doctor holds Reid’s red hardback copy of Conan Doyle’s _Sign of the Four_ jubilantly in his dexterous hands. When he realizes that Reid is only partially dressed, he has a brief moment of recognition that the situation should be awkward, but it doesn’t seem to faze him. He’s seen much stranger things.

“My book!” Reid exclaims, appearing both shocked and relieved, but then apprehensive. “Did you take it from my bag? That’s—Maeve sent it to me …” he averts his eyes shyly and trails off. “It’s really special.”

“Ooooh, the plot thickens!” The Doctor raises his eyebrows and looks at the book. “And I don’t mean ol’ ACD’s plot; those got _real_ thick after our run-in with the anthromorphic lupine superchanger …” he speaks with a bizarre air of quiet authority, but then realizes that he’s being impertinent. “Anyway, it seems our entanglement has something to do with this book, actually. Quite, _quite_ interesting.” The Doctor is deep in thought for several moments, before he processes everything Reid has said. “Who’s Maeve?”

“My, uh …” Reid’s entire face flushes slightly pink. “I don’t know ...”

“Your … special _lady_?” The Doctor auto-completes with a wistful note in his voice.

“I guess you could say that.”

“So, this _Maeve_ ,” The Doctor says casually, but then his tone of voice gets unusually high as he attempts to ask his question inoffensively. “She’s human too?”

Reid is thrown completely off guard. “As opposed to … What else would she …?”

The Doctor gives him a knowing look that says ‘keep thinking about it.’

“I mean, there’s no way … C-could she?”

“Does she keep any secrets from you?” The Doctor prompts him. “Are there things about her you can't explain or understand?”

“It’s not that …” Reid appears a bit bewildered. “You can’t be implying that there are … there are sentient things on earth that aren’t hu—”

Reid doesn’t even finish before The Doctor interjects. “What, did I skip over that bit?” he asks. “Surely it came up at _some_ point! You’ve been chatting with _me_ all day.”

“You?”

“Of courseme! You had no trouble believing that I’m a quantum-entangled teleporting stranger, but you get all incredulous when you hear that I’m a Time Lord?”

“T-Time Lord?” In a nervous response, Reid grabs at his elbows with opposite hands, bringing his pectoral muscles together. He looks up to the corners of his eyes for a moment, though, as if something about the phrase is recognizable to him.

“There’s no time to explain now, I’m afraid.” The Doctor chuckles a little at his own pun. “Look, you said you’d help me when your case was solved. It’s solved now, and who knows how long ’til I get pulled back to the Tardis again—”

He is interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing. In an unconscious reaction, The Doctor tosses Reid’s precious book haphazardly onto the bed in order to pull the small silver flip-phone out of his coat pocket. He fumbles with it awkwardly, showing that it’s a bit unfamiliar to him. As he does this, Reid snatches up _The Sign of the Four_ and cleaves it to his bare chest protectively.

“Mickey’s,” The Doctor explains, nodding his head toward the cell phone. “Been using it to keep in touch with Rose and him over there.” He says the words as if they will mean something to Reid, while at the same time he continues struggling to answer the call. Finally, he flips it open, but also pushes several buttons, causing the phone to inadvertently put the call on speaker phone. “Rose?” The Doctor asks.

A woman’s voice is frantic on the other end. “Doctor! I’m at my mum’s house and there’s this big party and there’s these giant, tin-man robot things …”

The Doctor’s face drops with the same wrinkled rejection as Reid’s discarded purple shirt, which still lies in a pile on the ground.

The Doctor instantly knows what she means. “It’s happening again,” he says so quietly that he can barely be heard.

“What’d’you mean?” Rose asks.

“I’ve seen those … _things_ before.”

Reid looks at The Doctor in utter confusion, but Rose doesn’t waste a beat. “What are they?” she asks.

“Cybermen.” The Doctor’s voice vibrates as it hits a low pitch. He puts his hand over the cell phone, in the 1997-way of attempting to keep someone on the other line from hearing him.

“We’ve got to get to her, and fast,” The Doctor says. He removes his hand from the phone and practically shouts, “We’re coming to help, Rose!” Without another word, he slams the flip-phone closed and looks at Reid expectantly.

“We?” Reid has a deer in the headlights look.

“You told me you’d help with the entanglement, but we can’t do any of that while Rose’s in danger.”

“So you want me to come with you?” Reid asks. “When? How?”

As if on cue, the lamp in Reid’s room flickers again.

“Now!” The Doctor exclaims. “I can feel my energy waning. Any second, I’ll be zapped back to wherever the time vortex brings me … it’s been surprising me all day, but hopefully, it’ll bring us somewhere near Rose in the parallel world. It’s usually her or the Tardis …”

With his book in one hand, and the other hand empty, Reid holds both of his arms out in the style of an exaggerated shrug, and shakes his head in a way that communicates the question: ‘are you serious?’

“Quick! Give me the book!” The Doctor orders.

“What? No, I—You can’t have it!”

“No, no, don’t give it to me. Just let me—” The Doctor shakes his head and leaps toward Reid. He slaps his right hand onto the book as if swearing an oath on a Bible.

Reid instinctively pulls it away, which causes The Doctor to trip as he loses stability. He almost falls forward onto the ground, but catches himself with both hands. He immediately whirls around, and attempts to stand back up by grabbing Reid’s elbow. Reid wobbles for a moment under The Doctor’s weight, and catches his eye. A look of spontaneous understanding passes between them.

“You mean, the entangled …?” Reid pieces things together out loud. Then, as if he can’t believe the idea he’s currently entertaining in his mind, Reid shrugs and murmurs, “Allons-y.”

The light in the room flickers sporadically. This backlights the Doctor’s face as he raises both eyebrows in surprise. “What did you just say?” he asks with a twinkle in his eyes.

“Oh, sorry,” Reid says quickly. He winces, as the pain that typically corresponds with the entanglement begins to take over. Nonetheless, his natural excitement to explain things takes over. “It’s French for ‘let’s go.’” With the hand that isn’t holding the book, he raises his fingers to his head and stretches them over his temples. Using his words to fight through the pain, he speaks increasingly faster, but with occasional pauses, where he stops to rub his head. “Or, well, morphologically speaking it’s slightly more complicated than that … see … it’s technically the first person plural imperative of the verb _aller,_ ‘to go’ … and the added ‘y’ is an adverb or sometimes pronoun that means something like ‘there’ but also sometimes isn’t literally—”

The Doctor is grinning. As a bright light begins to overwhelm more and more of the scene, he interrupts Reid. “I know what allons-y means, and, well,” he tilts his head back and forth, as if weighing what to say “… and I know most of that, actually, it’s just…” He pauses for several seconds, and narrows his eyes slightly in thought. “Well, let me just say …” We can hear his smile from ear to ear in his voice. As the scene fades completely to bright white light, he finishes in a loud yell: “Allons-y!”

The screen now fades to black. Reid lightly narrates the closing voiceover, which he performs with simultaneous seriousness and just an edge of clever wit:

_The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy._

Reid’s voiceover pauses for several moments, and then adds with just the perfect touch of humor: _The past tense of toast … is toasted. Joseph Fink._

************************************

_Author’s voiceover:_

**_Next time, on Doctor Spencer … Who? Episode 2, “The Age of Good” …_ **

_Cybermen, entanglement, and Rose—oh my! Reid, still shirtless, is suddenly transported from Quantico to a parallel universe under attack by the infamous Cybermen. What will happen when Reid meets Rose Tyler, a woman who feels so familiar that it hurts? And how will a man with an IQ of 187, heart of pure gold, FBI agent’s sense of duty, and criminal profiler’s mind, respond to humans who have been de-humanized and trapped in metal bodies?_


	2. The Age of Good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cybermen, entanglement, and Rose -- oh my! Reid, still shirtless, is suddenly transported from Quantico to a parallel universe under attack by the infamous Cybermen. What will happen when Reid meets Rose Tyler, a woman who feels so familiar that it hurts? And how will a man with an IQ of 187, heart of pure gold, FBI agent’s sense of duty, and criminal profiler’s mind, respond to humans who have been de-humanized and trapped in metal bodies?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for their generous views, kudos, and feedback! I appreciate all of it, so please keep it coming! Just a few reminders: I've outlined this story in immense detail, but I'm writing the entire thing this month as a part of #NaNoWriMo. As such, please be forgiving of any editing errors -- I plan to go back carefully later. The form is also experimental and developing as I go, so you'll see some stylistic changes between this episode and the last. The authorial voice will probably be about the same, though, take it or leave it. Some of this is tongue-in-cheek and all of it is self-aware.
> 
> My original goal was to post a new chapter here every 3-4 days, but the chapters are so long, it looks like it'll be more like every 5-6 days. Final note: Since this is a fix-it, the base storylines and some of the dialogue are taken or slightly adapted from the original shows. I do not claim ownership of that writing or any of these characters.

“Allons-y!” The Doctor’s words echo through bright white light. The scene takes a few seconds to fade into view. When it does, it’s intense, horrifying, and dangerous, to say the least. It’s late at night, and The Doctor and Reid have materialized in the middle of a circle of Cybermen: Both doctors, however, are posed leaning awkwardly over a red hardback book, their hands braced on its cover as if it’s a portkey.

As they come to their senses, Reid looks down at the book that he holds; then he lifts his eyes up to meet The Doctor’s. With an expression of sheer terror, it hits him that he isn’t wearing a shirt.

“Aah!” Reid shrieks, clutching the book close to his naked pecs as if it’ll cover him up. Then, he slowly turns to investigate his surroundings. “AAH!!” he screams in shrill, unapologetic terror.

In Reid’s point of view, we pan around the semicircle of Cybermen. The solid steel robots, though human in shape, are as mechanical and nonhuman as they come. Their uncanny faces have holes for eyes, triangle-shaped metal that only hints at the shape of a nose, and straight rectangular mouths that sometimes glow when they “speak.” A shiny silver pole goes across their heads like a lunchbox handle, entering on each side in the place where their ears would be.

They are all standing in the spacious front lawn of a large luxury home. Coming full circle, we now see that it’s not just Reid and The Doctor, but Rose and Mickey, who are under the Cybermen’s attack. Rose is inexplicably dressed in a short black and white server’s dress that makes her look very stereotypically feminine and a bit ‘French maid fetish.’ Next to her, there’s also a tall, thin-haired, middle-aged man in an expensive business suit. Next to Mickey, there’s a very 2005-style-hot blonde man, dressed like he belongs in a teenage heartthrob boy band. He is holding a large gun in his hands, and even though they’re immensely outnumbered, he aims it in serious threat at the Cybermen.

The Doctor removes his hand from Reid’s book, and cautiously steps to the side of the out-of-place FBI agent, slowly holding his hand up toward the blonde man with the gun. “Put the gun down,” he commands in a forceful yet calm manner. “Bullets won’t stop them.”

The blonde man looks to Mickey for a hint of confirmation. Mickey passes this nonverbal question on to Rose. Rose looks to The Doctor, and there is nothing but trust in her hazel eyes, which look especially light and glittery when contrasted to the dark black clothing she wears at the moment. The Doctor nods his head just a bit. Then, for a fleeting moment, Rose looks to Reid, who is huddling awkwardly with his book. Her face reveals both amusement and confusion, as if she would laugh if the situation wasn’t so dire. Meanwhile, with this chain of approval having passed along the group, the blonde man reluctantly lowers his gun.

As soon as he does, The Doctor steps forward, and puts both hands in the air. “We surrender!” he yells, making sure that his message is clear.

Rose, Mickey, Reid, and the other two men widen their eyes in shock.

“There’s no need to damage us. We’re good stock.” His voice wavers for an instant, but he remains resolute. “We volunteer for the upgrade program. Take us to be pr _o_ cessed.”

“You are rogue elements,” one of the Cybermen responds in a cold monotone. The scene grows increasingly more anxiety-inducing as a light fog rolls in across the ground.

“But we surrender!” The Doctor insists, his brow furrowing in anger.

“You are incompatible. You will be deleted.”

Reid hugs his book like a small child afraid of the dark.

The Doctor pleas with them. “But we’re surrendering! Listen to me—”

“You are inferior,” comes the unfeeling response. “Man will be reborn as Cyberman, but you will perish under maximum deletion.”

All together, the circle of Cybermen extend their arms toward the group. They begin chanting: “Delete. Delete. Delete!”

“Rose!” The Doctor calls. “Do you still have that little power cell that you found beneath the Tardis console?”

“What—oh, yeah!” Rose is a bit preoccupied by their impending ‘deletion,’ but she reaches into the pocket of her serving outfit, and removes a tiny green crystal. It’s glowing ever so slightly. “Still letting it recharge, like you said!”

“Give it here!” The Doctor says quickly, and without a second to lose, Rose tosses it his way. His coat ripples beneath his arms as he reaches to catch the power cell, and in one swift motion, he clasps it carefully in both hands and blows onto it. The power cell glows furiously green for just an instant; The Doctor then extends it toward the Cybermen and sparks burst forth in all directions. Blue electricity zaps through the Cybermen’s bodies like little bolts of lightning, and all of them fall onto the grass, debilitated.

“Where are we? What’s going on?!” Reid demands, looking frantically from The Doctor, to the other people he doesn’t know, to the group of disabled humanoid machines that lie splayed across the yard around them.

“Introductions later!” The Doctor insists. “For now, run!” He shoves the power cell, which now just looks like a normal little crystal, carefully behind his coat and into his suit jacket pocket. He pats it carefully to make sure it’s secure.

The blonde man is the first to take the order, and he begins leading the group toward a black nine-passenger van that’s waiting at the end of the nearby driveway. The others follow suit. The Doctor’s light brown coat billows sexily behind him. Meanwhile, Reid looks gangly and awkward as he holds his arms across his chest insecurely, but we know it’s just because he’s out of his element.

“Everybody in!” The blonde man says, as he becomes the first to reach the van. Mickey, Rose, The Doctor, and Reid aren’t far behind, but the middle-aged man in the business suit stops with a look of worry and hesitation on his face.

“Come on, Pete!” Mickey yells.

The man, who we’ve now learned is Pete, remains troubled. “I’ve got to go back. My wife’s in there!” He gestures back to the house, which is surrounded by fleets of marching Cybermen. Smoke puffs out of the building in certain places, and muffled screams can be heard.

The Doctor shakes his head knowingly. “Anyone inside that house is dead,” his words sound harsh, but The Doctor speaks gravely, painfully aware that he’s the only one brave enough to state the truth. “If you want to help, then don’t let her die for nothing. You’ve got to come with us right now.”

Overhearing this, Rose stops in her tracks as well. A look of anguish makes her pleasant features fall.

“Rose …” The Doctor urges, under his breath so that only she can hear. “She’s not your mother.”

“I know,” Rose tries to lie, but doesn’t even convince herself. She stays standing still.

Now that the other two have stopped, Reid stops running also—just a few feet away from the van. The blonde man has already leapt into the driver’s seat. Mickey isn’t far behind. He jumps into the passenger’s side.

“Start the car, Jake!”  Mickey shouts to the blonde would-be rock star, and beckons to the others outside with a sweeping hand gesture.

Reid looks back and forth between the black van and The Doctor.

“Oh, come on!” Jake groans.

The Doctor stands directly across from Rose. He takes her fingers in his gently. “It’ll be all right,” he says, and tugs on her hand, encouraging her to come close to him. He pulls her close to his chest, and puts his other hand on the back of her head. “This isn’t your world,” his voice is hushed as he speaks into her ear. His tone then shifts from consoling to reassuring. “And now that _he’s_ here, we can get everything back to its proper place.”

Jake interrupts the moment. “I’ve never seen a slower getaway in my life!” his pitch raises in irritation. Reid, looking more distraught and cold than ever, glances back at the house behind them, his FBI instincts and personal ethics pressing him to do something other than run away.

“All right,” Rose sighs, and pulls back from The Doctor. “All right, let’s go.”

When Rose and The Doctor step toward the van, Reid finally decides to get in, instead of simply standing uncomfortably next to it. With Mickey and Jake in the front two seats, Reid slides open the back door, climbs inside, and bends over considerably as he clambers into the back. Pete follows suit, taking the back seat with Reid. Rose and The Doctor follow last, sliding into the two seats in the middle of the van.

Before The Doctor has even finished shoving the door shut with a loud slam, Jake peels out of the driveway.

“So, then,” The Doctor begins. He claps his hands while Jake accelerates, throwing everyone in the car roughly against their seats. The Doctor leans over his shoulder and looks back at Reid. “Allow me—”

“Hold on a minute,” Jake interrupts. “Where’re we going?”

Reid rubs his shoulders with his hands, as if his body is screaming, ‘I’m naked!’ The Doctor picks up on this.

“Good question! Looks like we’ll have to make a quick stop back at the woods that we mentioned,” The Doctor tells Jake. His tone of voice reveals that this is a possibility, but also a considerable inconvenience. He turns to Rose. “There’s gotta be something he can wear in the Tardis, yeah?”

“Sure.” Rose seems preoccupied. “Lots of things. But is that really worth going all the way back _there_ for? Couldn’t you just—” She points to The Doctor, then to Reid, then Back to The Doctor again. Reid and The Doctor only look at each other in confusion.

Rose rolls her eyes, and then turns over her shoulder to Reid just as the Doctor did previously. She looks thoughtful. “I mean, no offense, um … sir,” she adds, sincerely but quickly.

As Rose finishes speaking and looks at him, though, we see their eyes meet from Reid’s perspective, and they continue to look at each other for several seconds afterward. A light buzzing sound can be heard that gets louder and more alarming the longer their eyes are connected. Rose is actually looking at Reid in a completely commonplace way, but Reid hyper-focuses on her face like she’s boring a hole through his soul. Even though they only hold each other’s attention briefly, it seems to take an eternity; by the time Rose looks away, the ringing sound has grown distressingly loud, which has an effect on Reid’s vision. Everything in his point of view is fuzzy, appearing in the “blurry colors” way the world does to a very nearsighted person who isn’t wearing their glasses. 

Reid puts his face in his hands, and his head bobbles as he starts to look dizzy. Rose perceptively turns to The Doctor, rather than Reid, for her question. “Is he OK?” she asks.

“Reid?” The Doctor calls back, but Reid is unresponsive. He folds completely over, like a person assuming the emergency brace position that airlines advertise in their safety pamphlets.

“You _sure_ he’s human?” Rose inquires further. “He’s acting a bit strange, if you haven’t noticed.”

After several seconds, Reid finally sits back up. He takes a deep breath, swipes at his hair with his hands, and sighs.

“I’m sorry, I don’t—it’s all just—so—” Reid struggles to say words.

“He’s human all right,” Mickey chimes in. “You’ve gotta remember what it’s like to be in his position. It’s a lot for someone to handle, learning all this.

“He’ll be better once we fill him in,” The Doctor suggests. “And it’ll also be good for me to hear what’s happened with you when I was … over there.” He gestures as if Reid’s world is just a few feet over to the left—which, to be fair, is theoretically possible. Then he turns to Reid to explain further, but as he talks, his words come out so quickly that they may or may not be helpful. “I’ve been bouncing back between your world and this one, but at the end there, it was getting really unpredictable. Not sure if it’s something to do with the entanglement, or if it’s all just _extra_ tricky because the Tardis malfunctioned and inexplicably took us to this parallel place.”

Reid looks a little dazed, but he narrows his eyes in an attempt to focus better on what The Doctor is saying.

“So! Reid, this is Mickey. He’s with us.” The Doctor nods to Reid, then to Mickey. Reid looks up, nods ever so slightly, and purses his lips in recognition of the introduction. The Doctor continues: “Oh, and by us, I mean me and Rose.” He smiles just a little bit as he says her name.

To this introduction, however, Reid puts his head down and averts his eyes. The most he can do is hold up his hand as a feeble wave. Rose raises one eyebrow, taking a bit of offense, but The Doctor continues.

“And Jake, he’s with a group that’s been resisting Cybus Industries—the mega corporation that makes all the technology in this world, including the Cybermen. Well, the Cybermen in _this_ universe, anyway, but that’s another question for another day.” Each time The Doctor says the word Cybermen, a clear disdain can be heard in his voice.

Reid looks back up, but keeps one hand along the side of his forehead as if shielding his face from Rose. The Doctor now directs Reid’s attention to the middle-aged man directly next to him. “And lastly, this is Pete Tyler, he’s—”

Jake doesn’t let The Doctor finish. “Pete Tyler is a known affiliate of Cybus Industries. In the house back there, he laid a trap that’s wiped out the government and left Lumic in charge.” Even though he’s driving, Jake gestures threateningly toward the large gun that he’s flung across his lap. “We can’t trust him.”

Immediately, Rose protests. “Don’t you dare threaten him,” she declares, and lunges to the side of her seat, as if protecting Pete as he sits in the row behind her.

“I’ll threaten whoever I want!” Jake argues. “You’ve already caused more problems than you’ve solved. That disaster in there, with _you_ ,” he glares at Rose, “got my partner Ricky killed, and left me with this parallel-universe version of him …” he glares at Mickey now “… who I keep forgetting, by the way, isn’t really my friend at all!”

The Doctor doesn’t allow Jake’s angst to excuse his behavior. “If anyone threatens to harm _anyone_ elsehere, you’ll make me your enemy. After what I just did with the tiniest piece of technology from _my_ home, do you _really_ want to do that?”

“The bigger question is: Why’re both of you protecting him, if you’re really here to help _stop_ Cybus?” Jake questions. “I have evidence that says Pete Tyler’s been working for Lumic since twenty point five.”

“He’s my—” Rose’s voice is small, almost childlike, as she begins, but she catches herself and clasps her hand to her mouth at the same exact moment that The Doctor gives her a cautionary look.

Jake doesn’t see this take place. He simply continues talking. “I can prove everything. We’ve got a government mole who feeds us information. Lumic’s private files, his South American operations, the lot. We get secret broadcasts twice a week that confirm Pete Tyler’s been working for Lumic the whole time.”

“Those secret broadcasts—they’re from ‘Gemini,’ right?” Pete says in a serious tone.

“How’d you know that?” Jake asks.

“I’m Gemini. That’s me. I’ve been feeding you information because I knew we had to stop Lumic before—”

As Pete talks, the expression on Jake’s face begins to ease up as he realizes that what Pete’s saying makes sense. Rose, meanwhile, looks both impressed and relieved.

Reid, on the other hand, is the one to interrupt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He holds both hands up in the air in confusion. Everyone in the car turns to him, as if they expect him to ask a very silly question. He tilts his head slightly to the side, puts one hand under his chin in thought, and asks, “ _Who’s_ Lumic?”

The Doctor looks pleased. “Now _there’s_ my criminal profiler!” He reaches all the way back around his chair, extending his arm with great effort in order to pat Reid proudly on his very bare shoulder. Then he turns back to everyone else in the car.

“By the way!” The Doctor declares, “I forgot the obvious! Everyone else, this is Reid. _Doctor_ Reid, from the FBI—he does criminal profiling _,_ as I mentioned—and he’s also studied just about everything else—so he might come in handy, I think.”

Jake, Mickey, and Pete grunt some indistinguishable responses that amount to ‘nice to meet you.’

“So … Lumic?” Reid asks expectantly, not forgetting the important question at hand. As he does, he crosses his arms across his chest uncomfortably for what seems like the thousandth time since he arrived in this world. After asking his question, he looks around the car, growing increasingly more awkward as he settles into the new situation. With the fear of ‘maximum deletion,’ now subsiding, his introversion begins to kick in.

“Ah, yes, Lumic.” The Doctor begins.

“John Lumic,” Jake picks up, “business tycoon and CEO of Cybus Industries. From what we gather, he has a base of operations at Battersea—that’s where he was building his prototypes.”

“Do you know what the Cybermen are … for?” Reid’s voice quivers through the cold air. After he asks the question, he looks forward to Jake, catching Rose’s eye in the process. Instinctively, Reid flinches, but doesn’t seem to be affected by any sounds or lights anymore. Relieved, he now turns his attention to her for the first time. A look of empathy passes between them.

Rose rolls her eyes. “Come on, Doctor!” she sighs, seemingly out of nowhere. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you just _gave_ him something to wear?”

“What’re you guys talking about back there?” Jake demands. “You’ve gotta keep your driver in the loop if you mean we don’t have to waste our time taking him to—”

“No, keep going,” The Doctor insists. “I should let the power crystal recharge in the Tardis anyway—it’s got to start over now that I used it back there.”

Rose doesn’t pay attention to the debate about their route. Instead, she gives an accusatory look to The Doctor, continuing her argument from before. “You drag Reid here from his everyday life, right into this trap of a situation where everything’s gone wrong, introduce him to all of us, and make him do it with his …” she points up and down at Reid’s bare chest. “When he’s not even dressed!?”

“Didn’t I mention that he’s American?” The Doctor says, only half in jest.

Reid forces a very uncomfortable chuckle.

Rose scoffs. “Look at you!” she says to The Doctor. “All your layers of clothes, and you make him drive to the Tardis instead of just giving him something!”

Pete is growing more and more grumpy at their current situation and misplaced priorities. “I know why Lumic’s sent the Cybermen on this rampage, if anyone’s interested,” he declares.

Rose and the Doctor, however, don’t hear him. They’ve locked eyes. They hold the stare for several seconds until The Doctor gives in. “Fine,” he grumbles, and pulls his arms out of the sleeves of his trench coat. He sits up in his chair a bit in order to sweep the coat out from under him, and pass it to the back of the car.

Reid takes it gratefully, but the quizzical look on his brow suggests that he’s not sure if this makes things more or less awkward. “Thanks,” he murmurs.

Reid shrugs the coat over his shoulders, and it slips onto his frame perfectly. Even though he’s sitting down, it sweeps down effortlessly beside him on both sides. His fingers shake anxiously as he fumbles to button it closed.

“He’s dying, you know.” Pete clears his throat. Rose, Reid, and The Doctor snap back into focus, looking alarmed. “John Lumic is dying. This all started out as a way of prolonging life, of keeping the brain alive at any cost.”

“Is that … is that possible here?” Reid reaches up to smooth his hair, which picked up just a bit of static when the coat brushed over it.

“It’s not only possible, it’s happening to everyone they get their hands on.” Pete grits his teeth. “Lumic takes the living and he turns them into those machines. He’s trying to eliminate disease and death and everything that makes us human … and instead, usher in an Age of Steel that makes us all immortal, but the same: slaves to his army.”

“How is he getting so many people under his control?” Reid continues to assess the situation in true FBI-Agent style.

Jake takes this one. “It’s the ear pods.” He points to two BlueTooth-like metal objects sitting in the cupholder of the van. “Everyone in the world wears them, all the time. Get their news, entertainment, everything, delivered every day, directly through them. Use them for communication—work, play, the whole lot. All it took was a little reprogramming, and Lumic was able to lead almost all of London to his headquarters, like sheep to the slaughter.”

“And … why can’t they just take the ear pods off?”

“It’d cause a brainstorm,” The Doctor answers. “Humans. So susceptible, so willing to just submit. Those ear pods are connected to each user’s mind. If you take the ear pods off, they’ll all go mad.”

Suddenly, the van screeches to a halt. They’ve finally arrived at their destination: a densely wooded area along the side of the road.

“This is where you said to go?” Jake asks The Doctor rhetorically. No one in the car moves yet. “Well, go on, then!” Jake insists. “Do what you came to do and hurry back!”

“You staying in the van?” Mickey turns to Jake, who nods. “All right, then, I’ll wait with you.”

“Same,” Pete agrees.

The Doctor is the first to slide the van door open and leap out. Rose follows closely behind, and Reid clambers out after them. As he alights from the large vehicle, the full glory of The Doctor’s coat on him becomes apparent. He looks powerful and important, and just a little more edgy than usual, with it flaring out around him.

The Doctor unconsciously takes Rose’s hand, and they run back into the woods just a bit. Reid isn’t far behind. They approach the instantly recognizable blue Police Box, and The Doctor flings the door open.

Reid’s face falls at the sight, though. It’s dramatically different inside than the interior that he’s experienced in his own world. This Tardis is dark inside, with just a few backup lights illuminating the entire space.

“What happened?” Reid wonders out loud.

“Long story. Time vortex, power cell, parallel world and the Tardis: breaky breaky,” The Doctor says nonchalantly while gesturing for Reid to follow him back into a specific corner of the Tardis. He opens a small door to a space that’s completely dark, but seconds later, hits a light switch. The light surprisingly snaps on.

“Aha!” The Doctor declares. As they rush into the room, his sentences continue to be quick and grammatically terse. “Wardrobe light! Not important means not connected to the main power source. Easily supported by the backup.”

Reid barely even hears him, though. He stands in awe at the sight that surrounds them. The group of three stands in the middle of a giant room, twice the size of any walk-in closet in Quantico. Shirts, jackets, costumes, accessories, and all sorts of articles of clothing hang at various levels, high and low, all around them. Unlike Reid’s closet, which is an obsessive compulsive dreamland, this wardrobe has no organizational structure. Instead, it groups all different colors in all different places, leading to quite a hodgepodge of clothing.

“How am I supposed to find something …?” Reid marvels.

“D’you need help?” Rose offers. “What’re you looking for?”

The first words out of Reid’s mouth surprise even him. “A tie,” he answers immediately. Then he adds: “A tie, and a sweater.”

“A _tie_?” The Doctor repeats. “You’ve got all these incredible costumes, you’re here in this parallel world with us, and you ask for a _tie_?”

“I feel much better in ties. People take me more seriously,” Reid defends himself, but unapologetically. “And you’re the one to talk.” He looks The Doctor up and down, silently accusing The Doctor of wearing very traditional men’s wear—including the off-white shirt and blue tie beneath his suit—as well. Rose looks on, intrigued by the striking similarities and minor differences between the two people in her company.

Before Reid starts looking at the clothing, he scans the room for a safe place to put his precious book. In the corner of the wardrobe room, he sees a large black box that looks like a safe.

“Is that your—?” Reid points to the box.

“Ah, yes. You can put your book in there if you’d like,” The Doctor offers. Then, he thinks quietly to himself: “It just might help anchor us.”

“How do I get it open?” Reid doesn’t hear the end of The Doctor’s sentence.

“Just put your hand on the front. It’ll only open for you.”

Reid looks to The Doctor questioningly. “But I’ve never used it before. Don’t you mean it’ll only open for you?”

“It’ll only open my stuff for me, and your stuff for you. Simple piece of dimensionally transcendental technology, similar to the Tardis herself. Go on.”

The Doctor turns away, on his own mission to find the fastest way to recharge his power cell. He finds a cabinet of various glowing, electronic looking materials, which has a beautiful iridescent bowl in it. He carefully pulls the power cell out of his jacket pocket and places it inside. Its green glow grows stronger instantly, and The Doctor looks pleased with himself.

“Oh, what _Apple_ will do in the next 150 years,” he smiles to himself, and begins shuffling through some of his other electronic toys.

Reid is too preoccupied examining the safe to hear The Doctor’s quasi-clairvoyant comment. He approaches the little black box. It’s only a few feet tall, and sitting on the ground, so he crouches next to it. Following The Doctor’s instructions, he cautiously places his hand on its front. The safe makes a few whirring noises, then opens up: it’s empty, but surely enough, much bigger on the inside, revealing row after row of black wooden shelves that actually look ideal for storing books. Reid places _The Sign of the Four_ down on one of these shelves, and pats the cover gingerly.

Suddenly, as he moves his hand away from the book and leans slightly backward, Reid disappears right in front of Rose’s eyes. The Doctor, now playing with some kind of squishy ball with a digital screen, misses this entirely.

“Doctor!” Rose squeals. _The Sign of the Four_ remains exactly where Reid left it, but the lower-case “d” doctor himself is nowhere to be seen.

The Doctor turns around, knowing this tone of Rose’s voice all too well.

“Reid’s gone!” Rose shouts.

The Doctor takes a few steps toward the safe, but then suddenly stops for no apparent reason. He squints and brings his hand to his own head for just an instant, and then Reid begins to reappear. After materializing for a few seconds, Reid comes back almost exactly where he was, except that now he stands facing Rose and The Doctor instead of the safe.

Reid looks up at them, and raises both of his eyebrows in concern.

“What did I—just—” he questions, looking dizzy and dazed.

“Reid!” The Doctor grabs both of his shoulders, and shakes him a bit harder than he probably should. “Where did you go? Tell me!”

“I just … appeared at the BAU,” Reid says uneasily. “I was hanging out with my team after hours. JJ was there with her son Henry, talking about how he was afraid to go trick or treating because he heard her talking about the monsters … I’m his godfather, you know … I love that little boy, and he … They had just gone to the Air and Space museum, and he told JJ that he wanted to get me something …” He reaches his right hand over the place where the side pocket of his pants is, and tilts his head when he recognizes that something is actually there. “Huh.”

Reid’s story comes out pretty coherently, but The Doctor looks confused by it. “What a random series of things …” he shakes his head.

“You all right?” Rose checks in.

Reid blinks rapidly several times. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

Reid straightens up his back to stand a little taller, runs his fingers down the front of The Doctor’s long coat, and takes a deep breath. Somehow, he centers himself and sinks back into his normal demeanor. “Let’s … get back to this,” he says, and gestures broadly all around the unbelievable room.

“You sure?” Rose continues to show concern in her voice.

“Yes. Didn’t I—like 10 seconds ago—I asked you to help me find a tie. Do you think you still could?” Reid rewinds through his own memory like VHS tape. Rose looks surprised, but with that, Reid takes a few steps back. As if sensing that its job is done, the black safe behind him closes its own door.

The Doctor gives Rose a nod of approval.

“All right …” She turns to a rack of clothes on the other side of the wardrobe room.

Reid turns to the nearest rack of clothing, slinging off The Doctor’s coat as he whirls around. He tosses it over a nearby hanger, and then approaches some of the clothing. He soon spots something satisfactory: a light blue and white checkered dress shirt.  Unlike when he was getting dressed in his own home, he puts this one on hurriedly, and rolls up the sleeves in a messy fashion.

“Here!” Rose calls out from one of the other clothing racks. Reid turns to face her. She’s holding a dark blue skinny tie and a bright maroon cardigan. “How’s this?” she offers the clothes to him.

“Perfect, thank you.” Reid accepts the tie first, and slings it around his neck. Expertly, he lines up the one side to be twice as long as the other, swoops a few loops around each other, and ties a perfect knot without even looking. He tightens it up around his neck, then reaches for the sweater Rose is holding.

As he pulls it over his head, we see that it’s not just a red sweater, but a red v-neck sweater with trendy dark blue and white striped trim. Altogether, the ensemble has many more colors than we saw Reid wearing in the previous episode, yet they still suit his personal style aesthetic. Reid holds out his arms as if to say, ‘Ta-da.’

“Shall we?” Reid nods to them.

“Let’s go,” the Doctor agrees. He and Rose turn to leave the room, but as they’re walking out, Reid takes The Doctor’s trench coat off the rack where he left it, and slips it on once more over his sharp new look.

The three of them make it through the Tardis once again and exit through the front door. As they leave, The Doctor finally sees that Reid is wearing his coat again.

“What’ve you still got my coat for?” The Doctor looks almost startled. “We brought you all the way back here for some clothes—and you could’ve grabbed another …?”

“It’s cold outside,” Reid answers matter-of-factly. “And I like this one.”

The three of them look to each other in silence. Instead of being awkward, the moment feels of some silent camaraderie and budding friendship; there are no other words to be said. The three jump back into the van, ready for action.

“So, we’re off to Battersea?” Jake checks in. As soon as The Doctor nods, he slams down his foot on the gas pedal.

************************************

The black van is parked outside of a creepy old power plant. Hundreds of everyday people flock toward the central building, walking with stiff movements and expressionless faces like automata. Jake, Mickey, Rose, The Doctor, Pete, and Reid hurry out of the van door to investigate the situation.

“The whole of London’s been sealed off, and the entire population’s been taken inside that place to be converted,” Jake explains.

“We’ve got to get in there and shut it down, then,” Rose responds.

“How?” Reid wants to know.

“I’ll think of something,” The Doctor shrugs.

“Hold on. You have to come up with a plan! Strategize. Make sure you clear each room, one by one, to protect each other from the uns—I mean—person?—thing?—you’re dealing with. Are you just going to make this up as you go along?” Reid has a seemingly allergic reaction to The Doctor’s spontaneity.

“Oh, yes, and I’ll do it brilliantly.” The Doctor compliments himself. Jake and Pete look annoyed, but Rose half-smiles cutely. “So what do we know? How do we get in?” The Doctor looks to Jake and Pete for some intel.

“From what I gather, there’s cooling tunnels underneath the plant. We should be able to sneak in through those,” Jake begins.

“That’s a start!” The Doctor affirms. “If we can take those tunnels to the Control Center, we should have a shot at disabling the Cybermen from there. Reid, I want you helping me with this.”

Reid offers a nervous fake-smile in response.

“What should _we_ do?” Rose keeps the plan moving.

“There’s another way in. Through the front door,” Pete adds. “If there’s any chance that my wife, Jackie, survived the attack on the house … They’ve taken her there for upgrading, and there’s a … a slight possibility …” he hesitates, his voice brimming with emotion. “… that I can save her by going in.”

“We can’t just go strolling up,” Rose objects.

“We?” Pete asks.

Rose looks to Pete, then to The Doctor, in sheer determination. “We haven’t got time. Doctor, I’m going with him, and that’s that.”

The Doctor immediately gets a protective glimmer in his eyes. Nonetheless, he looks at Rose with admiration and respect. “No stopping you, is there?”

“No.”

“I think I can help with that,” Jake interjects. “Take the model ear pods from the van as a disguise. There’s two sets. They don’t receive a signal, so they’re just for show. Might fool the Cybermen into thinking you’re just like the others.”

Rose nods in approval, then steps back to the van to retrieve them.

The Doctor turns behind him, as he surveys the chaos that runs rampant in the nearby power plant. His attention, however, fixes on a tall tower in the middle of things.

“Lastly, a job for you, Jakey-boy! You go to the control tower and try to jam the signal.”

“That’s a great idea—the signal is controlled from Lumic’s master zeppelin. There’s a possibility to cut it off with the right codes,” Pete adds.

“Right. Maybe you can get people their minds back so they don’t walk into that place without putting up a fight,” The Doctor finishes.

The Doctor turns to everyone in his group. Flickering lights from the chaotic plant cast an ominous glow on his finely structured face.

“We attack on three sides,” he says seriously. “Above, between, below. When Reid and I get to the Control Center, we stop the conversion machines.”

“Hold on a minute!” Mickey exclaims. “What about me? You’ve all got someplace to go, something important to do, and you’re just leaving me here—to wait with the van?”

“Oh, Mickey!” The Doctor looks apologetic. He clicks his tongue in thought. “You can, er—”

“You want to make yourself useful?” Jake demands. “Prove you’re not an idiot and that you _are_ like my friend—the version of you that the Cybermen killed?” he practically spits the words in anger.

“Yeah, I do.” Mickey says with determination. “I’m offering to help. I _always_ want to help, and I never get to.”

“Fine, then. Come with me, and prove you’re worth something,” Jake challenges him.

The Doctor sighs anxiously on Mickey’s behalf. “Good luck, both of you.” He nods to Jake and Mickey.

“And Rose—” The Doctor turns to her, and his entire expression falls soft as their eyes meet.

She doesn’t hesitate. She throws herself into him, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck. He nestles his face close to hers as they embrace, and both of them close their eyes for just a moment.

Mickey turns back, and sees the two hugging. “Rose, I’ll see you later,” he bids farewell with just the slightest hint of sadness.

Rose and The Doctor pull away from each other. “We all come out of this alive, you hear? And when we do, we meet back here.”

“That’s a promise,” Mickey agrees, then turns to walk silently away with Jake.

The Doctor puts both his hands on Rose’s shoulders, as if trying to prolong the moment when she departs as well. “You promise me too, you hear me?”

“I promise,” she whispers. They share one last, quick hug, then Rose steps back and walks over to Pete’s side. “Let’s do this.”

Rose gives Pete a rebellious smile that Rousseau would be proud of. Pete’s body language suggests that he doesn’t understand her attachment to him, but something behind his eyes twinkles in recognition.

Only Reid and The Doctor are left in front of the van. They exchange a mutual eyebrow raise and then begin walking as well. The three groups of two all go their separate ways.

************************************

Inside the cooling tunnels, a single beam of cold blue light shines down on a narrow ladder, illuminating it like a spotlight. A pair of Converse All Stars comes into view, but it’s hard to remember which 6’1” brain babe they belong to. The All Stars are off-white, however, and only remain on the top rung of the ladder for an instant before The Doctor leaps all the way down, landing on the ground with just a little bend in his knees like an action movie hero.

He steps back and looks up to the top of ladder, where another pair of Converse All Stars comes into view. This time, it’s Reid, who haltingly lowers one foot after the other, in a careful, studied attempt to descend the ladder.

“Come on, Reidy-Reid,” The Doctor urges him. “If you put your foot on every rung, you’ll step on my coat and get it dirty.” It isn’t quite clear if he’s joking or seriously attached to the coat. “We haven’t got all day!”

Reid finally makes it down, and they turn to face the long corridor before them.

“You don’t happen to have a torch, do you?” The Doctor gestures toward the darkness ahead of them.

“A what?” Reid takes a second to translate the question, then fumbles around, reaching his hands underneath The Doctor’s coat and into his own pockets. “Actually …” He pulls out a fat white pen which ironically has the NASA logo on it. “This … this is what Henry got me when I bounced back to my own … world.” Reid states the last word as if it’s a question. Then, he pushes down on the clicker top, but instead of releasing the tip of a pen, an impressively bright light shines out of its tip.

Reid shines the pen-flashlight in front of The Doctor for show, but continues describing his bizarre disappearance: “It doesn’t make any sense. When I went back there, I was wearing these pants, but _not_ your jacket.”

The Doctor raises a single eyebrow in confusion and surprise. “So, you went without a shirt when you bounced back for those 10 seconds in the Tardis?”

“No—I was wearing my own clothes. Something different than I wore yesterday, and different than I’m wearing now. What I’m saying is, I—I think I reappeared at some other time. A different day altogether.”

Both Reid and The Doctor process this information, but neither of them is quite sure what to do with it. So, moving on, Reid shines the light down the tunnel, revealing a long line of Cybermen on each side of the wall. Their shiny frames are all perfectly identical, and posed in the same frozen position.

The Doctor shivers for an instant, and taps on one Cyberman’s face. The metal body doesn’t react. “They’re already converted, just put on ice. Come on.”

With one hand holding the flashlight pen, Reid instinctively reaches toward his side as if grabbing his gun. He looks down in disappointment when it isn’t there. “Still in my checked luggage bag …” he mumbles to himself, but then thinks of something else, and speaks a bit louder for The Doctor to hear.

“Remember what I said before, about having a plan, and clearing each area?” Reid poses this as a question, but it’s clear that he’s going to say more. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from going after unsubs at the BAU, it’s never to take anything for granted. Just because one—” he gestures toward a Cyberman, but hesitates at the thought of what it is, “one _Cyberman_ reacted one way, doesn’t mean they all will be the same.”

“What’d’you mean?” The Doctor responds incredulously. “No offense to psychology, but this isn’t the same as your cases. These are machines, not humans.”

“Not all machines are the same, Doctor,” Reid says knowingly as they continue slowly forward. “That’s what I’m telling you. I—I imagine that if you have access to all other kinds of technologies …” he trails off at the thought “… that this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.”

************************************

At the Battersea Power Station main building, Rose and Pete, ear pods in place, approach the entrance. It’s a large, gray building with smoke stacks billowing up from various places, and Cybermen all around. A voiceover intercom can be heard repeating: “Chamber six now open for human upgrading. Chamber seven now open for human upgrading,” counting slowly up to each consecutive number.

Rose and Pete keep blank looks on their faces and try to walk mechanically. Cybermen escort other humans, who are truly under Cybus Industries’ command, inside.

“We could die in here,” Pete says quietly under his breath, just before they get within hearing range of the Cybermen. “Why are you doing this?

“Let’s just say I’m doing it for my mum and dad,” Rose replies, and looks to him with sympathy behind her thick black lashes.

************************************

“How d’you mean, not all machines are the same, though?” The Doctor asks. “That’s the Cybermen’s whole purpose. To make men—” he hesitates “—which they take to mean _people_ , by the way. Cybus takes people and makes them non-people by making them all the same. Might even be why his name ‘Cybermen’ is both non-inclusive, if you ask me, and all-inclusive.”

“That’s just the point,” Reid agrees. “I keep going through what you and Jake and Pete have said about the …” he smiles in even further agreement. “Cyberpeople. But, well, Maeve really loves Victorian literature and nineteenth-century science—” Even though it’s dark, it’s clear that Reid is blushing at the thought “—and we can’t forget the lesson of _Jekyll and Hyde_. Different raw materials produce different effects. There could be an imperfection in any of the metals or wires they use, or a .01% difference in the metal alloy from one model to the next, which can result in monumentally different operating patterns. And let’s not forget, if this man Lumic is ‘upgrading’ _people_ ,” Reid uses his one free hand to make air quotes around the word ‘upgrade,’ “That there are different people in each of these Cyber-bodies. No matter how much he brainwashes them, they’re still in there, somewhere, and there has to be some way to get them out …”

As Reid speaks, The Doctor eyes the Cybermen along the walls, deep in thought. At Reid’s last comment, however, he shakes his head in disagreement. “I wish you were right, but—”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish, however. One of the Cybermen twitches ever so slightly, and since they’re on high alert after Reid’s digression, both Reid and The Doctor see it immediately.

“They’re waking up!” The Doctor yells.“Run!”

Both doctors instantly flee down the tunnel. The Cybermen—or Cyberpeople are waking up, but the process is slow. Even when they start walking, they march methodically, with a steady, loud clomping noise.

Reid and the Doctor make it to the end of the tunnel, where another ladder is placed. The Doctor leaps onto the rungs first, and expertly scurries up. He pushes open a trapdoor at the top.

“Quick! Get up here!” The Doctor shouts behind him, as Reid scrambles up the ladder as best he can. Reid doesn’t move nearly as quickly as he should.

The Doctor pulls himself up to the ground level with unexpected strength. He jumps to his feet, and bends down to offer a hand to Reid.

Reid has just emerged from the top of the tunnel. He takes The Doctor’s hand, and they clasp onto each other tightly. The Doctor pulls him up just as the Cybermen close in on the ladder.

With no time to lose, The Doctor lets Reid go and jumps back toward the trapdoor. He slams the top closed, and secures it with a few quick pulses of his sonic screwdriver.

“Oh, good team, _Doctor_.” The Doctor half-smirks, and tilts his head as if to wink.

************************************

Meanwhile, in the Battersea headquarters, Pete and Rose continue proceeding among the crowd of brainwashed faces heading toward various processing rooms. The voice of a Cyberman continues over the intercom: “Chamber six now open for human upgrading. All reject stock will be incinerated.”

As they walk, a Cyberman stops Pete and Rose in their tracks. “You are Peter Tyler,” it says in a computerized monotone. “Confirm you are Peter Tyler.”

Pete waits just an instant, deciding how best to stay disguised as someone who’s in the ear pods’ thrall. “Confirmed,” he gulps.

“I recognize you. I went first. My name was Jacqueline Tyler.”

“No!” The words burst out of Rose’s mouth in anguish before she can stop them.

“What?” Pete looks distraught.

“They are unprogrammed. Restrain,” Jackie the Cyberperson declares.

“You’re lying!” Pete insists. “You’re not her. You’re not my Jackie!”

“No, I am Cyber-form. Once I was Jacqueline Tyler.” The cyber-mouth glows with each syllable. “Her brain is inside this body.”

A group of Cybermen comes to take Pete and Rose away. As they force the two ‘unprogrammed’ humans off to the side, both of them look utterly heartbroken.

“I came to save her. Jackie!” Pete shouts over his shoulder, looking back in the crowd of people and Cyberpeople in an attempt to identify which model was her.

“They killed her. They just took her and killed her!” Rose fights back tears.

“Maybe there’s a chance. Maybe we can reverse it.”

“The Doctor said earlier that you can’t, though. It can’t be reversed.” Rose inhales sharply.

“Which doctor?”

“What?”

“You said _The Doctor_ ,” Pete clarifies. “That means _your_ doctor, right, not the shirtless American?”

“Yes, _my_ doctor,” Rose uses the pronominal possessive with some pleasure. “Why?”

“I don’t know, but I have this feeling …” Pete explains. “This feeling, deep down, that the _other_ doctor knows something your Doctor doesn’t.”

“What’d’you mean? That’s—that’s impossible.”

“No. Not at all,” Pete insists. “ _Your_ doctor was saying earlier, before the American got here, that all the Cybermen were the same. That they weren’t human anymore. That’s what Cybus Industries wants us to think, too. But … But Jackie just showed us that your Doctor was wrong.”

************************************

Jake and Mickey have arrived at the control tower, where they’ve located Cybus Industries’ master controls inside Lumic’s zeppelin. Jake is clickity-clacking on a large keyboard, which is connected to at least a dozen screens all over the zeppelin’s industrial-metal walls.

“We’ve got others on our team who’re better at computers,” Jake apologizes to Mickey. Then, he slams his hands down on the desk in frustration. “This tech is advanced—I’m not sure if I have the know-how to jam the signal.”

Jake remains hunched over the desk, breathing heavily. Mickey steps beside him and instinctively puts his hand on his shoulder. “All right, then,” Mickey says kindly. “I said I’d prove myself to you. I’m pretty good with this stuff … Let me have a go.”

************************************

Reid and The Doctor have just emerged in the Cybus Industries Control Center. They walk along a wide corridor in a wide steel room, looking for the best route to the conversion machines.

A Cyberman steps around the corner, and stands its ground in front of them. “You are not upgraded,” it says in the same voice as all the other Cybermen.

“Yeah? Well, upgrade this!” The Doctor reaches into his suit pocket for the sonic screwdriver. He shoots a heavy blast at the Cyberman, which immediately falls down, disabled and stiff as a board.

The two doctors look all around the room anxiously, but no other Cybermen can be seen or heard.

The Doctor crouches over the Cyberman curiously. “Now,” he begins. “Let’s have a look. Know your enemy.” He reaches for the front panel on the Cyberman’s chest, which has a large Cybus Industries logo on it. He shakes his head in disapproval. “This logo on the front. I’ve seen Cybermen in other worlds, but Lumic’s turned these into a brand. They’ve got a heart of steel, but look.”

The Doctor presses his sonic screwdriver against the Cyberman’s chest panel and gives it a light twirl, as if it’s a real screwdriver or drill. The panel opens. Inside, a faint light glows from within a tangle of white and blue string-like coils that look almost like …

“Doctor, stop!” Reid calls out, and leaps to the ground next to him. He puts his hand over The Doctor’s, which holds the sonic screwdriver. When their hands touch, they both look up and meet each other’s gaze for a moment. Reid pulls away. “Are these veins and muscle tissues?” he asks worriedly. They wait a few seconds in silence. When nothing else happens, Reid sighs weakly and works backward through the question. “Is this organic matter?”

Reid looks both terrified and fascinated as he wavers between conflicting posthuman and Classical Humanist tendencies.

 

The Doctor, however, jams his screwdriver back into the mass of threads with a disgusted look on his face. “Hmm,” he thinks aloud to himself. “It’s got a central nervous system. Grown and modified from the human’s own DNA, then threaded throughout the suit … Oh! And look. An emotional inhibitor. Connected to the—”

Reid, peering over the Cyberman, knows what it’s connected to immediately. “The brain that was taken from the human!” he completes The Doctor’s sentence. He points to a small golden piece within the Cyberman, between the veiny bits and the wires leading up towards the helmet that holds the human brain. This small part of the suit continues to whir like an overheated computer, even though the Cyberman is motionless. “This isn’t just a mad vivisector …” Reid echoes Garcia’s words that seem to, and do, in fact, exist in another lifetime completely. Then he recites a few sentences, almost as if in a trance. _“It is not simply the outward form of an animal which I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also be made to undergo an enduring modification.”_

The Doctor furrows his brows in an utter loss. “What did you just say?”

“H.G. Wells. In _The Island of Doctor Moreau_ and his own essays on the plasticity of life …” Reid begins explaining, but then takes an intellectual moment to better contextualize. “Eighteenth century comparative anatomists argued furiously about whether or not ‘life’ itself was vital or material. Do we have a soul, or are we just a sack of meat?” Reid pauses to point to the Cyberman’s parts. “In other words, is there a human in here, or is this just a metal frame? Wells and others picked up the same vitalist versus materialistquestions in the vivisection debates, hailing the more material understanding as the only philosophy compatible with true empirical science. In mid-century American genetics research, we did the same thing, but now we actually know much better. Today, not even DNA is so … so _final_ and _definite_ as we like to believe—”

“Is this … more stuff from Maeve?” The Doctor sounds both impressed and unsure of how the information relates to their current situation. “You said your girlfriend likes literature, but … What is she, a professor of Victorian Studies?”

Reid stutters as he gets cutely embarrassed. Then he replies, “No. She’s a geneticist. But it’s all related. All the things she loves … they all explore the same questions.” Reid shares this as if he’s thought about Maeve’s uncommon love of two seemingly different academic fields many times before. “But all of those things also relate incredibly well to all the things that are happening to us, _here_ …”

The Doctor interrupts Reid as he waxes philosophical. “So, the Cyber—person—is living in here, and the organic and mechanical parts are cross-wired, possibly even genetically. But this—” he points to another piece inside the Cyberman. “This is an emotional inhibitor, cutting out the thing that really makes this Cyberman human.”

“Not cutting it out, Doctor,” Reid corrects him. “As the name says, it’s only inhibiting. And that gold encoder there,” he points back to the other piece. “It’s inhibiting some of the genetic information, too. I think you’d be surprised—”

The two doctors have grown so involved in their conversation that they fail to see a group of five Cyberman come around the corner. These Cybermen march up and surround them on all sides: there’s no escape, and too many to fight. The steel cyborgs extend their arms threateningly, and then make some computing noises as they examine Reid and The Doctor.

“Sensors detect a binary vascular system,” one Cyberman states to The Doctor. “You are an unknown upgrade. You will be taken for analysis.”

Both men immediately rise to their feet and put their hands up in the air. Reid raises both eyebrows, and looks over to The Doctor in sheer fascination at the idea of a “binary vascular system” as the Cybermen lead them away.

************************************

Reid and The Doctor are led into the Control Room, where Rose and Pete have also been taken. They are guarded by yet another large, serious circle of Cybermen.

When The Doctor sees Rose and Pete, he exaggerates a loud sigh, and says sarcastically: “I’ve been captured, but don’t worry! Rose and Pete are still out there. They can rescue me. Oh well, never mind.” He cracks a smile, then looks to Rose with concern. “You okay?

“Yeah,” her voice breaks. “But they got … Jackie.”

“We were too late. Lumic killed her,” Pete adds.

“Then where is he, the famous Mr. Lumic? Don’t we get the chance to meet our Lord and Master?” The Doctor demands.

A Cyberman responds. “He has been upgraded.”

“So he’s like you now?”

“He is superior. The Lumic Unit has been designated Cyber Controller.”

A door opens, and a giant, extra-shiny Cyberman rolls out in a huge Cyber wheelchair. He begins speaking in a terrifying monotone: “This is The Age of Steel and I am its Creat—”

He is interrupted by loud human screams, and other sounds of chaos suddenly echoing down the hallways and through the surrounding rooms.

The Doctor catches Reid’s eye. “Mickey,” he mouths, then gestures up toward a camera in the corner of the room. “Mickey and Jake made it to the tower!”

The Cybermen don’t catch what The Doctor is saying.

“I will bring peace to the world. Everlasting peace, and unity, and uniformity.”

The Doctor and Reid both object simultaneously. The Doctor shouts, “And imagination?” while Reid yells, “Are you sure that’s what you’re doing?”

“There is disagreement among you. You lack uniformity. You are inefficient.”

Reid allows The Doctor to take over for a minute. “Yeah, but that’s it. That’s exactly the point! Oh, Lumic, you’re a clever man. I’d call you a genius—”

As if knowing what words he’ll say next, Reid jumps in and speaks at the exact same time as The Doctor. “Except I’m in the room,” they both finish the sentence together.

Rose can’t help but laugh. She covers her mouth with her hand, but her amusement is still visible in her eyes. Pete shakes his head, feigning disapproval.

The Doctor continues: “Everything you’ve invented, you did to fight your sickness. And that’s brilliant. That is so human. But once you get rid of sickness and mortality, then what’s there to strive for, eh? The Cybermen won’t advance if you’ve taken away everything that makes them human.”

Reid purses his lips, clearly wanting to speak, but he hasn’t yet pieced together how to express what he’s trying to say. Cyber-Lumic and The Doctor continue their banter.

“You are proud of your emotions,” Lumic states.

“Oh, yes.”

“Then tell me, Doctor. Have you known grief, and rage, and pain?”

The Doctor’s whole body fills with emotion as he answers with an affected grimace. “Yes. Yes I have.”

“And they hurt?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I could set you free. Would you not want that? A life without pain?”

“You might as well kill me.”

“Then I take that option.”

“It’s not yours to take—” The Doctor is ready to go on a long tirade, but Reid interrupts him.

“And it’s not as black and white as you think—” Reid begins.

Rose, Pete, and The Doctor all give Reid a questioning glare, as if to ask, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

“Yes, that’s right,” The Doctor practically elbows Reid in the side with the nonverbal cues that he’s dropping. “Sometimes you have a _plan_. But your _plan_ doesn’t always go the way you want it to.” Then, he looks up to the camera in the corner of the room, knowing that Mickey and Jake can see them on the other side of it, and hoping that they don’t change their course of action. “And, sometimes, your _plan_ involves humans. The ordinary kind. The kind that just want to _prove themselves._ ”

Reid narrows his eyes in thought, and then quickly examines the room, mentally calculating what The Doctor’s plan might be.

The Doctor continues and Reid listens intently: “Plans can involve an ordinary person. All it takes is for that person to find, say, the right numbers. Say the right codes. Say, for example, the code behind the emotional inhibitor, which just might be right in front of him, because even an idiot knows how to use computers these days.” The Doctor nods at the camera. “Everyone knows how to find something encrypted in the Lumic Family Database, under er—What was it, Pete? Binary what?”

“Binary nine.” Pete seems to understand the gist of what The Doctor is doing.

“So, that code, say, just might allow an ordinary person to cancel their emotional inhibitors all by themselves, making the Cybermen implode under their own insanityat the very realization of what they’ve become, thanks to your lack of foresight _, Lumic_.”

Reid grows more and more disturbed as The Doctor lays out his plan. He’s finally ready to intervene: “That ordinary person might also consider rethinking this plan, though,” Reid jumps in, and holds one finger up in the air like a cartoon character with an idea. “Because imploding the Cyber _people_ would be as good as killing them, when it’s theoretically possible to save their lives.”

“No, no, I think that _person_ carrying out the _plan_ would keep on fighting. Anything to save his friends.” The Doctor’s voice grows tense as he tries to make Reid stop making suggestions.

“Your words are irrelevant,” Cyber-Lumic states.

“Yeah, I talk too much, that’s my problem,” The Doctor throws his hands up in the air, being purposefully showy in order to throw Lumic off. “Let’s not forget how you seduced all those ordinary people in the first place, making every bit of technology compatible with everything else. One could, hypothetically, send a particular code that they’ve found to the mobile they leant me, say, from another mobile that they happen to have.”

“Or, or!” Reid waves his finger at the camera again, and speaks loudly as if daring The Doctor to make him talk. “One _could_ reverse the process by _re-ordering_ the code, so that rather than turning the emotional inhibitor off and killing everyone, one _could_ theoretically apply such a code to the adaptive immune system, and re-organize antibodies’ interactions in order to fight foreign matter and re-generate organic materials.”

************************************

As they listen to this battle of wits, Mickey and Jake disagree on what course of action to take. Jake, desperate to destroy any and all Cybermen that he can, pulls out his cell phone and begins to follow The Doctor’s orders. Mickey, however, listens carefully to Reid. When Reid is done with his explanation, Mickey leaps forward, attacking Jake from behind in order to grab the cell phone and attempt to follow Reid’s risky, yet more humane, plan.

Jake and Mickey struggle away from the control panel, and fall to the ground. They wrestle over the cell phone in extreme tension.

As they fight, Reid’s voice can be heard over the camera. “Do you really want to kill everybody here, when there’s a chance that you could save them?”

************************************

Mickey’s cell phone beeps in The Doctor’s pocket. He pulls it out just as Lumic gets fed up with the situation.

“I’ve had enough. Units, delete—” Lumic begins. However, before he’s able to finish his sentence, The Doctor pulls the cell phone out and smiles with glee at the numbers on the screen. He thrusts it into a nearby adapter waiting by the control panel, and instantly, blue electricity flies out of the computer screens. The machinery all around the room begins to smoke and spark.

Meanwhile, all the Cybermen in the room—including Lumic—grab at their handle-like heads as they begin to have some kind of physical and emotional breakdown. They appear to be in immense pain.

************************************

In the Control Tower, Mickey and Jake have risen to their feet again, and the cell phone is placed inconspicuously on the desk directly between them. They watch the camera feed with immense excitement.

“Yes!” they scream in unison. Mickey pumps his fist into the air, and a look of understanding passes between him and Jake.

Without warning, Jake rushes toward Mickey like an (American) football player going in for a tackle. Mickey has no time to physically react—only his eyes widen in utter alarm. As Jake comes against Mickey, however, he throws his arms around him and gives him a huge hug.

“Yes, yes, yes!” Jake shouts, as the sheer force of the flying embrace sends both men directly back to the ground. Mickey looks relieved and immensely happy.

“Quick, though!” Mickey urges, and points to the television screen, where the chaos of deteriorating Cybermen begins to unfold. “We’ve got to go get the others.”

************************************

Reid looks to Rose despairingly; she returns his empathetic look. “Did Mickey really listen to _you_?” Reid asks. “That code—it’s killing all the people inside the Cyberpeople!”

Even Lumic begins making mechanical screaming noises, and he wheels away frantically as the other Cybermen start running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They often slam into each other, or nearby walls or control panels, knocking things apart and causing destruction everywhere around them.

“There’s no way of knowing that his plan would’ve worked, or even _could_ have worked!” The Doctor does not apologize. Instead, he glares gravely at Reid. “So come on. Let’s get out of here!”

“Wh-where do we go?” Reid looks around them anxiously.

Pete points to one side of the room. “There’s an emergency exit around this corner!”

He leads the way, and Rose, Reid, and The Doctor hurry to follow him. They burst around the corner, and Pete throws open a small metal door that says “EXIT” in glowing red letters. As soon as it flies open, though, we see that somehow, this room is several stories above ground level. The door leads out onto a long, New York style fire escape that runs down the whole side of the building, but the rickety metal staircase leading down to the street has been snapped off directly below them.

“Looks like the only way is up,” The Doctor says with enthusiasm.

“Should we really—” Pete is interrupted when Rose begins shouting, “Look! Up there!”

Across the asphalt from the building they’re trying to escape, they can see the tall Control Tower where Jake and Mickey went to work. There is a large zeppelin on the roof that begins to slowly take flight.

“That’s Lumic’s zeppelin! If Mickey and Jake jammed the signal, that must mean it’s them in there—” Pete shouts.

“Yes! Good boys!” The Doctor exclaims. “All right, then. Everyone. We’re still going up this fire escape. But now it’s for a rooftop rescue!”

The Doctor leads the way. Pete follows close behind, then Rose, then Reid brings up the back. They rush up the ladder as the zeppelin gets closer and closer.

“So … many … ladders,” Reid shakes his head as he watches his feet carefully. We see his All Stars making halting, careful steps on the very narrow metal rungs, and behind him, The Doctor’s coat blows slightly in the wind.

Meanwhile, The Doctor peeks up over the top just as the zeppelin arrives within landing distance of the roof. He doesn’t even spend time exploring the roof ahead of them—instead, he turns immediately around, reaches down his hand, and helps hoist the other three up, one at a time.

When Reid finally makes it to the top, he is the first to notice the scene that’s unfolding before them. Though there aren’t many of them, a small group of Cybermen is gathered on the roof. They crouch in various agonized positions, grabbing their heads and screaming in terror. Their metal limbs are twitching, and making the sound of a tin can being crushed.

“What have you done?” Reid demands. “I thought you were listening when we talked about Cyber _people!_ ”

“I’ve cancelled the emotional inhibitor. The code from the Control Tower fed it throughout the system into every Cyberman’s head. They’ve realized what they are, and it’s killing them—finally putting an end to Lumic’s abominable plan.”

“So you’re killing all these people inside—” Reid argues.

“To save everyone else in the world! It’s not an easy decision, but it had to be made. There was no other sure way.” The Doctor is filled with passion now.

At that moment, the zeppelin arrives directly above them, hovering just a few yards above their heads. Looking up, the group can see someone drop a long rope ladder out of the bottom. It unfurls right in front of The Doctor.

“Up we go!” He yells to everyone. “We’re out of here!”

“You’ve got to be kidding …” Reid murmurs in disbelief.

The Doctor grabs the ladder and starts climbing. Quickly, Pete and Rose leap on behind him. The Doctor scurries all the way into the compartment of the zeppelin by the time Pete and Rose have climbed high enough for Reid to grab on. Pete makes it on board next, with Rose almost to the top as well. But as The Doctor looks down, he sees that one of the Cybermen on the roof is following suit. It’s grabbed onto the ladder, just inches behind Reid—who, fed up and exhausted by ladder climbing, still has a considerable way to go.

“Look out!” The Doctor and Pete call down.

“We’ve got to get out of here, now!” Mickey calls to them from the pilot’s seat. “Are we all right to start flying?”

At that moment, Rose reaches the zeppelin floor. The Doctor grabs her hand and pulls her inside. They smile at each other. “Yeah, we’re good,” The Doctor answers. “Reid’ll be up here any second. Getting moving might even help—”

Reid is getting closer to the top, but is still at least five or six feet away when the zeppelin lunges forward, and the rope ladder sways dangerously. He shrieks, and one of his feet slides off the unstable rope rung. He grabs the ladder even more tightly with his hands, but as his foot flies down, the Cyberman beneath him grabs onto it.

Amid all the noise and action, Reid hasn’t even noticed that the Cyberman is beneath him. Now, as the heavy metal creature drags him down with all of its weight, panic fills Reid’s eyes.

“Shake it off!” The Doctor shouts. “And get up here to us! Remember: we couldn’t save them. There’s nothing you can do!” The Doctor yells the words as if he knows this is a struggle Reid continues to face.

Reid looks closer at the Cyberman. He can’t hear the conversation that transpires inside the zeppelin, but Mickey and Jake do overhear The Doctor shouting at Reid.

“What’re you talking about?” Jake demands, and runs from the cockpit toward The Doctor. “Of course we saved them. _He_ made sure of that.” He motions toward Mickey with the side of his head.

“We’re only high-tailing it out of here because the zeppelin is low on hydrogen, and the reversal process won’t be pretty to watch,” Mickey adds.

Panic strikes The Doctor’s face. He uncharacteristically freezes up.

Meanwhile, Reid is watching the Cyberman’s arm carefully, as it continues to pull on his leg. The metal around its fingers begins to twitch frantically, then slowly mutates from hard metal into soft pink flesh. It is shakily transforming.

“The body always fights foreign invaders …” Reid whispers to himself.

As the zeppelin soars high off the ground, and flies toward the woods where they parked the Tardis, Reid suddenly puts all his weight into one hand’s hold on the ladder, and releases his other hand from the rung. He fearlessly reaches down toward the Cyberman beneath him.

Still holding onto his foot with one hand, the Cyberman grabs up toward Reid’s arm with the other. At the moment that Reid and the Cyberman grab each other’s forearms, the steel hand transforms into a woman’s arm. Her skin is smooth and pale, and her hands are perfectly manicured.

Rose, Reid, and The Doctor are gathered around the open trapdoor of the zeppelin, frantically grabbing at the top of the rope ladder and watching Reid and the Cyberperson intently.

“Jackie!” Pete shouts.

Surely enough, they all look on as the rest of her body transmutes to its normal shape. Jackie Tyler is wearing a luxurious, low-cut black gown, and her brightly dyed-blonde hair is pinned and curled into an extravagant up-do.

“Mum!” Rose exclaims. Pete darts his head toward Rose in surprise at the word.

With that, they pull on the rope ladder, heaving Reid and Jackie the last few feet up into the zeppelin.

Reid tumbles inside first. He quickly leaps out of the way, rises to his feet, and dusts off The Doctor’s coat. “And you call yourself a doctor.” He shakes his head in disapproval.

The Doctor disagrees: “Not so fast. Just yesterday, attempting the impossible made one man _insane_ , and not a proper doctor, according to you. All those legs he was cutting off, trying to ‘fix’ people …”

“ _He_ was just like Lumic, then, trying to prolong life whatever the cost. That’s not what we did here—” Reid argues, but at that moment, Jackie interrupts as she flops gracelessly around on the floor of the zeppelin.

Pete rushes to help Jackie to her feet. “Jacs, I—I thought—” he fights for words, but can’t possibly express himself. He pulls her toward him instead, embracing her tightly.

************************************

Several hours have passed. The group is back in the woods, working to tie up loose ends. A little ways off, the zeppelin is parked in a small clearing.

Pete, Jackie, and Rose stand in a circle near the Tardis. It is apparent that they are having a serious conversation: Pete and Jackie look completely overwhelmed, and Rose looks a little hurt.

“I’m sorry, we just can’t—” Pete is saying.

“We never had a daughter,” Jackie completes for him. “I’m sure you’re wonderful, it’s just—”

The Doctor steps out of the Tardis with his sonic screwdriver in hand. “Power cell recharged and back in place!” he grins, then puts the screwdriver back in his pocket. When he sees Rose, he unconsciously adds a skip to his step as he runs toward her. “Rose!” he calls.

Pete, Jackie, and Rose, in perfect, blood-relative unison, turn their heads to The Doctor. He is light on his feet as he canters towards them, but the look on his face is gravely serious, and his clothes are a bit disheveled. His dress-shirt is unbuttoned, and his skinny tie hangs from the left side of his collar. His open blazer moves with each stroke of his arms as he approaches.

Suddenly, he stops, still several feet away from Pete and Rose. A look of realization passes across his brown eyes, which look darker and more mysterious by moonlight.

“I’ve only got five minutes of power strong enough to take us back to our universe,” The Doctor says, raising an eyebrow as if in apology. He turns his gaze only to Rose and quiets his voice to a soothing tenor as he adds: “I know you want to stay and work things out, but we’ve got to go.”

“Thank you, for everything,” Rose says to Pete, a tear forming in her eye. “Dad.”

“I’m sorry—I—good luck—” Pete responds.

The Doctor struggles, looking at Pete, as he both understands Pete’s confusion but is protective of Rose’s heart. Pete and Jackie turn to walk away.

“Reid’s inside already. Now, let’s grab Mickey and get out of here.” He wraps his arm around Rose’s shoulder, and as the two watch Rose’s parents leave, Rose leans her head against him and lets a few tears fall. He looks down at her tenderly and kisses the top of her head.

On cue, Mickey and Jake emerge from the zeppelin and rush across the clearing to approach Rose and The Doctor. As they run, however, they straighten up various articles of clothing, as if they are just now getting re-dressed.

Rose and The Doctor exchange a knowing look.

“So, you’ve already said your goodbyes. Off we go then!” The Doctor catches Mickey’s eye.

“Er, thing is, I’m staying,” Mickey says.

“You’re doing what?” The Doctor repeats.

“You can’t!” Rose objects.

“It sort of balances out, because this world has lost its version of me. The version of me that was his partner, that was useful, that helped people.”

“And there’s work to be done,” Jake adds quickly. “When everybody who’s been converted gets turned back, there’ll be a lot of confusion. A lot of political upheaval. We need people who know what happened, who know how to stop it, to stay.” He looks to Mickey sweetly. “And we need people who will fight—fight to do the right thing, not just to let one group of people die for the sake of making another group live.”

“But you can’t stay,” Rose’s face falls at the thought.

“Rose, my gran’s here. She’s still alive, and she needs me too.”

“What about me? What if I need you?”

Mickey gestures to The Doctor, whose arm is still around her.

Mickey is resolute. “It’s all right. I’m not upset or anything. It’s just that it’s you and him now. You don’t need me anymore.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Jake promises Rose.

The Doctor shakes his head. “It’s your choice to stay, Mickey, but I don’t know if we can ever make it back. Travel between parallel worlds should be impossible. Coming here was only an accident caused by a bizarre entanglement … and Reid and I are working together to cut off that entanglement, and stop any accidents from happening again.”

Mickey nods his head knowingly. “I know, Doctor.”

There is a brief pause, then The Doctor reaches out to shakes Mickey’s hand. Afterwards, Mickey then turns to his oldest friend in the world.

“Don’t be sad, Rose. Who would’ve thought we’d get to do all this someday? We’ve had a laugh. I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

The Doctor lets go of Rose so that she can give Mickey a parting hug, a hug that has to somehow last forever in their minds.

“Go on, then, don’t miss your flight,” Mickey insists. He and Rose exchange one last look of parting friendship, then The Doctor and Rose step into the Tardis.

“Jake, you want to watch this,” Mickey brags, as The Doctor closes the Tardis doors. The space-and-time machine begins to fade in and out of visibility, making its whooshing sounds as it slowly disappears.

Jake takes Mickey’s hand.

************************************

Inside the Tardis, Rose and The Doctor are facing each other, and The Doctor is holding both of Rose’s hands in his. Reid is nowhere to be seen in the Tardis.

The Doctor reaches up, and tucks some of Rose’s light yellow hair behind her ear. He caresses the side of her face with his hand, and wipes one of her tears away with his thumb. He leans his forehead against hers.

“Hey! Help! Something’s happening!” Reid, no longer wearing The Doctor’s coat, emerges from the wardrobe of the Tardis, flailing his arms around himself in terror. Like the Tardis, he himself begins fading in and out of existence.

Rose and The Doctor leap apart. Rose puts her face in her palm in frustration.

“Got someplace to be?!” The Doctor asks, and runs toward Reid. “’Cause I was really hoping to take Rose to America in the 1950s, but _sure_ , let’s go wherever you want …”

Reid flickers one last time, then disappears completely. The episode fades to black.

************************************

Author’s Voiceover:

**_Next time on Doctor Spencer Who? : Episode 3, “The Apprentice and the Idiot" ..._ **

_After their entanglement pulls The Doctor into Reid’s world much more permanently than last time, he and Rose must disguise themselves as friends from Reid’s sci-fi book club to help the BAU stop a dangerous unsub. But when Rose tries to stay under the radar by volunteering at a local animal shelter, the case quickly gets personal for The Doctor._


	3. The Apprentice ... and the Idiot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their entanglement pulls The Doctor into Reid’s world much more permanently than last time, he and Rose must disguise themselves as friends from Reid’s sci-fi book club to help the BAU stop a dangerous unsub. But when Rose tries to stay under the radar by volunteering at a local animal shelter, the case quickly gets personal for The Doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to those of you who continue to read! Wow, #Nanowrimo is insane, but Chapter 3 is finally done. The main plot is coming into being, and shit's about to get real. **Insert adult language and moderate violence warning here.**

As the episode fades in, we hear Reid recite the opening epigraph with conviction:

_Nietzsche called it ‘the wish to be elsewhere.’ Who hasn’t wondered, at some point: why am I here instead of some other place?_

_Stanley Stewart._

We fade into an unusual location. We are looking over a baseball field. The grass is green, the diamond is brownish red, and the white lines have been freshly drawn in chalk. Morgan is approaching the baseball diamond from behind. He wears a black muscle shirt, which looks, of course, amazing: he has dark blue tattoos on both of his biceps, which accentuate his muscles in a subtle yet badass way. He holds a baseball bat in one hand as he gets nearer and nearer to home base. He stands on the plate for a moment, then looks from left to right expectantly.

Morgan reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his cell phone, which is a sleek black touchscreen. The time on the screen reads 3:03 PM.

“Kid’s never late …” Morgan mumbles out loud.

As he eyes the phone, he gets distracted by a push notification for a new text message. It’s from Garcia. He sets the baseball bat down, swipes the notification, and reads it: as his dark brown eyes scan the text, he breaks into an amused smile.

We pan around behind Morgan. He remains distracted as he begins to type a response on the phone. Once we’ve circled all the way around, we see that something is beginning to materialize directly on top of second base. As its presence becomes more permanent, we realize that it’s Reid. He fades in and out a few times, and then, as if by magic or by _Star Trek’s_ transporter, Reid is physically standing there, perfectly intact.

Interestingly, however, Reid is neither shirtless nor wearing The Doctor’s coat. He’s dressed in a crisp white button-down, a sophisticated black and brown tie, and a dark gray blazer. His caramel hair looks much better than it has in any recent memory; it’s smooth through the top, and curls out just so slightly behind his ears and the nape of his neck. He looks not only more put together, but more well-rested, than he did when he suddenly disappeared.

When he sees that he’s standing solidly on the ground, he looks first at both of his hands, flipping them forward and backward. His silver designer watch, fastened over the sleeve of his button-down, but under the sleeve of his blazer, glints in the Quantico sunlight.

Reid sees the red sand and white rubber base beneath his feet. “Where—why—?” he begins, but then he gasps audibly. He looks up quickly, and sees Morgan, who is still completely engrossed in his smart phone.

************************************

Inside the Tardis, the room around Rose and The Doctor is shaking violently.

“Hang on!” The Doctor cries as he’s knocked toward the Tardis console. He uses his momentum to stumble toward a piece of metal that he can easily grab onto. Holding on tightly with one hand, he extends his other arm to Rose, who stumbles into him in similar fashion.

Rose’s voice is high-pitched among the confusion. “Where’s Reid?” she starts. “And where’re we going?”

“Same, answer, both questions!” The Doctor cocks his head. “But we’ve got to land it first!”

The Doctor and Rose close their eyes in anticipation of a crash landing, but at that very instant, all becomes suddenly still. There is a pause for two or three seconds before they decide to take a look.

When Rose and The Doctor open their eyes, everything is calm and quiet. Some of the small trinkets inside the Tardis may have shifted during flight, but all the lights are working and nothing is out of place.

Rose and The Doctor both let go of both the console and each other, then glance around themselves.

“Should we have a look outside?” Rose suggests.

************************************

Reid clasps his hand over his mouth when he sees Morgan typing into his phone.

“The intramural softball team!” he whispers to himself. “I can’t believe I told Morgan—and now, I—”

There is a slight whirring sound behind Reid. When he hears it, a sense of dread passes behind his eyes. He turns around slowly, and surely enough, the Tardis has just appeared, quite suddenly and within a hundred feet of where Morgan is standing. Fortunately, as if some kind of minor charm has affected him, Morgan seems completely unaware of the action that is taking place just across from him on the baseball diamond.

************************************

Rose pushes open the Tardis door, and sunlight immediately pours into the Tardis interior. She pokes her head out, and then instantly turns around to The Doctor.

“You were right—Reid’s here!” she says. “We followed him to some kind of field!”

The Doctor approaches the door behind her, and when he stands just inches from her, he carefully places his hand on her shoulder. We now notice, for the first time, that she isn’t wearing the purple leather jacket or the server’s costume that we’ve seen her in before. Now, she has a dark blue-gray jacket on. It’s carefully zipped up only mid-way to reveal her classy yet low-cut white undershirt.

The Doctor, standing directly behind his companion, appears extra tall in comparison to her. He straightens up his back and then tilts up his head ever so slightly so that he can better see over her. His mouth opens just a bit as he investigates the situation. Then, as he notices that she’s wearing something different, he looks down at the hand that he’s placed on her shoulder. He scrunches up his eyebrows in confusion. From there, he looks up to the back of her head, where her hair has been pulled back into a messy blonde bun, and accentuated by a baby pink ribbon.

“That’s—” The Doctor begins to make a comment about her apparel, but at that moment, Rose sees makes a different observation.

“Oh my God, they’re playing baseball!” she exclaims, without turning around to face The Doctor. “It’s brilliant, it’s perfect, they’re actually—”

************************************

The moment Rose begins to speak, Reid turns around in terror. From his perspective, we see Rose hiding halfway behind the dark blue Police Box door, and halfway, (excitedly) peeking out to get a good look at the baseball diamond.

“Hey! No!” Reid makes a shushing noise.

Rose, however, looks directly past him, and her gaze falls on Morgan.

“Ooh, look!” she raises one eyebrow suggestively.

Behind her, The Doctor rolls his eyes.

Without a second thought, Rose steps out of the Tardis. Both Reid and The Doctor wince in response, as if the same pain in the left temple hits them both at the exact same time.

As Rose walks out of the door, we see that she’s not only wearing a new jacket, but a beautiful, flowy pink skirt that perfectly matches the ribbon in her hair. It’s cut at a tea-length in 1950s style, with a frilly layer of white tulle beneath it to give it a wonderful retro shape. She skips toward Reid with a huge smile on her face.

“We going to play _sports_ today?” Rose asks, faking an American accent over the American stereotypical word. She turns over her shoulder to The Doctor. Meanwhile, he is hurrying out of the Tardis after her. “You promised we’d do New York someday …” she then shifts her focus to Reid. “Is that where we are, or?”

They are suddenly interrupted by a new voice to the conversation.

“Whoa, there, Reid!” Morgan exclaims. He has finally looked up from his phone. As he catches sight of them, he begins hurrying toward the group in a light jog. “It was hard enough getting you to agree to this, and now you’re bringing your whole crew?”

When Morgan reaches the other three, they all stand in awkward silence for a moment.

Morgan tries a smooth recovery on the awkward silence: “Glad you could make it, though.” He looks at Rose with a glimmer in his eye, as if silently complimenting her beauty. “Derek Morgan.” He now shifts this proud look over to Reid with as much approval in his eyes as if he’s giving a standing ovation. Then, he focuses back on Rose. “And you are …?”

Morgan extends his hand very gracefully to Rose, and takes her fingers in his.

“Rose. Rose Tyler,” she responds, and shakes his hand daintily. She may not be smitten, but she is certainly flattered. “And this, this is—” she gestures to her side.

“The Doctor,” he completes her sentence with an unpleasant stiffness in his voice. The Doctor lifts up his hand for a serious handshake. Morgan takes the hint immediately and drops Rose’s fingers.

“Well, all right,” Morgan continues without ever breaking his cool, and communicates the idea of ‘no offense,’ without saying a word. He grabs The Doctor’s hand warmly, and after an initial firm handshake, releases it only partially to give The Doctor a fist-bump. The Doctor looks down at their interlocked hands in confusion—he attempts to respond appropriately, but doesn’t do a great job reciprocating the handshake.

“So, you brought your friends,” Morgan begins. “But … this _isn’t_ your friend … from the phone booth the other day?”

In unison, Reid, Rose, and The Doctor all turn anxiously behind them, at the place where the Tardis materialized. Amazingly, it’s no longer there, but they still seem alarmed by the assertion. Reid is the only one who knows what Morgan really means.

“No, no,” Reid quickly addresses their unspoken fear. “Rose isn’t the … lady …” he uses The Doctor’s nonspecific word, but it still makes him blush “… who I talk to on pay phones … sometimes.”

Rose and The Doctor exchange a relieved look.

“OK,” Morgan accepts this much, but isn’t fully satisfied. “But tell me, then. Why’d you bring two friends to something you didn’t even want to do?” 

“Oh, uh—” Reid speaks quickly. “They’re, uh, from my, um …” For an instant, he seems to make some connection or recognition, but it quickly escapes him. He continues his fib. “They’re from my sci fi … book … club.”

“Some nerds wantin’ to play softball?” Morgan doesn’t look convinced.

“Exactly!” Rose offers. “We’re visiting from England, so … Gotta give it a try, yeah?”

Morgan smiles and shakes his head. “Yeah, all right, then. You can give it a try if you really wanna learn.”  He looks at Rose’s skirt, then at Reid’s blazer, then at The Doctor’s suit. “Though you know, none of you really look prepared to play the game.”

“What?” Reid asks, and grabs at the collar of his shirt. He appears startled when he realizes that it’s a nice new outfit. Simultaneously, Rose and The Doctor inspect themselves as well. Rose pulls at the sides of her skirt, and seems absolutely delighted by them. She swishes the fabric back and forth in her hands as if she intends to spin around. The Doctor realizes that he’s wearing the same suit as always, but suddenly tries to look up at his own forehead with his eyes. With a glint of curiosity, he reaches up with his hands and pets his hair—which has been tamed into a 1950s quiff, the perfect harmony between pompadour and flattop. It’s rather becoming on him.

“My hair’s quite nice,” The Doctor says to himself, but then realizes that he’s spoken out loud. “I mean, my hair may be nice, but I always wear this.” He gestures down at the brown pinstripe suit.

Morgan chuckles, then nods at Reid. “I see why you’re friends with this guy.”

Rose tries to hold in her laughter, but bursts into an abrupt giggle and cute snort when she tries not to divulge the unusual circumstances of their friendship.

And thus, two minutes later…

The group is gathered closely around the baseball diamond. Morgan stands at the pitcher’s mound with a softball in hand, and Reid stands over the plate. Rose and The Doctor are very close to Reid, but waiting behind the protective chain link fence.

“All you gotta do is just swing right through, nice and easy,” Morgan calls to Reid. In response, Reid awkwardly attempts to swing the bat through the air.

“Close. But move your hips. Feel it all the way through,” Morgan continues patiently.

Reid swings the bat again, this time a little more convincingly than before.

“There you go. All right? I’m gonna throw you a ball now. You ready?” Reid nods, so Morgan tosses him a careful underhand pitch.

Reid swings gracelessly, misses the ball, and teeters as he loses his balance for a minute. He catches himself, but Rose and The Doctor look amused, and Rose giggles quietly.

“You think it’s easy?” Reid jokes to Rose and The Doctor, but does sound a bit exasperated.

“Well, gravity plus drag coefficient plus magnus—” The Doctor tilts his head, as if making some rough mathematical approximations. “Really, you just have to adjust the velocity of your swing—”

Reid rolls his eyes. “I know that. That’s not what I meant.”

Without warning, Morgan throws another pitch. Reid isn’t ready for it, so he makes a yipping noise and steps out of the way. Now, all four of them laugh.

“First rule of the game. Keep your eye on the ball!” Morgan shouts over.

“Keep your eye on the ball …” Reid processes it for a moment, but comes up with nothing. “How is that supposed to help when—”

Morgan throws another pitch. We see it crest perfectly over home base, and yet, Reid swings just a moment too late. Once again, the group laughs a little. He flushes pink.

“You said you wouldn’t make me relive my childhood sports memories!” Reid calls to Morgan. “Can’t you make one of _them_ go now?” He gestures toward Rose and The Doctor with the bat.

“That’s three strikes anyways, pretty boy. You’re out!” Morgan half-smiles.

Rose silently repeats the nickname to The Doctor, mouthing ‘pretty boy’ with great amusement.

Reid doesn’t see this, though. He simply looks relieved. He turns around and holds the bat out toward the chain link cage, as if there’s a spider on the opposite end of it, and as if The Doctor or Rose could possibly take it from him through the fence.

Rose and The Doctor look to each other. “You’re up,” The Doctor raises his eyebrows twice, and points to the bat.

Rose comes around the fence, her pretty pink skirt floating as she approaches. Reid hands the bat to her, and she calmly wraps her hands around it. She squeezes her fingers and thumbs around the bottom of the handle, narrows her gaze, and steps over home plate.

“Now there’s someone who knows what she’s doing!” Morgan calls approvingly. “You ready?”

Rose simply nods. Morgan doesn’t hesitate to throw the pitch. In fact, he tosses it with much greater commitment and speed than he used with Reid.

CRACK! The loud reverberations of the bat hitting the ball crash through the air, and the ball soars high up over their heads. It goes far past Morgan, and even past second base, flying into the outfield.

“Yeah!” – “Brilliant!” – “Atta girl!” Reid, The Doctor, and Morgan all call out excitedly. As if they’re actually playing a game, Rose runs to first base triumphantly. She smiles and doesn’t hesitate to slam her trendy British boots against the red sand as she passes the base and continues toward second. At this point, Morgan realizes that Rose is actually committing to the game, so he turns around and hurries after the ball. It hits the grass, however, and continues rolling, so by the time he catches up with it, Rose has already made it to third base.

The Doctor comes around the fence excitedly. Rose makes it just a few feet from home base right as Morgan rushes back toward the diamond, ball in hand.

Morgan gives up and shakes his head; Rose bounces onto home and then continues running straight into The Doctor’s arms. She leaps up, folding up her knees behind her as he takes her in his arms. He holds her with the purest, happiest smile on his face, and sways her back and forth. Her skirt swishes prettily in the air.

“Nice going! That was—” Morgan begins a compliment, but stops abruptly. That’s when we see that he’s reaching into his pocket for his phone again. This time, it’s a call.

He only exchanges a few quick words before hanging up. When he’s done, he shouts: “Bring it in!”

Reid takes the cue to come around the fence, and approaches the others.

“We’ll have to cut the game short,” Morgan says seriously. “We just got a case.”

The Doctor, Rose, and Reid exchange uncertain looks among themselves.

“What are _we_ supposed to do?” Rose asks Reid.

“Just … hang out until I get back?” Reid suggests. Then he hesitates and hastily adds, “But _try to stay under the radar_.”

“We’ll try our best to keep out of trouble,” The Doctor agrees, but then adds some lilt to his voice to imply that he’s giving a hint. “I don’t know where our _day_ may _take us_ , though.”

Morgan listens curiously, but is ready for business. “Well, it was nice to meet you,” he nods to Rose and The Doctor. “We’ll have to do this again sometime.

************************************

“Last night in Miami, the body of Amanda Lopez was found in an alley. She had been brutally beaten and suffocated,” Garcia begins. In her usual way, she wears an intense amount of the same color: a coral sweater set, coral beaded opera necklace, and coral 1960s-librarian-style glasses. For just a bit of contrast that completes the look, she has on bright red lipstick. “23 years old, originally from Tampa, she was a runaway. Couldn’t’ve been more high risk.”

The BAU team sits at the long table across from Garcia with manila folders in their hands. Garcia presses the button on her clicker, and some grisly images of the murdered woman appear onscreen. The brutality of the bloody beating with added plastic-bag suffocation is graphic even to the BAU.

Morgan thumbs through the information. “There was evidence of sexual assault, but there’s no way to tell if our unsub was responsible for that or not.”

As the team speaks, we begin to hear a very low-pitched droning sound. It’s barely noticeable at first, but as it grows louder, the sides of the scene begin to enclose, getting whiter and whiter around the edges until everything is incredibly bright and illuminated.

We pan around the room, and see that in the very back, there’s a small wall, partitioning off a little inlet where the BAU keeps a coffee maker and some minimal kitchen supplies. Reid instinctively turns his head toward that partition, and rubs the sides of his temples anxiously.

Surely enough, the glimmering effect of spontaneous materialization begins to ebb and flow through the small corner as the droning sound reaches its deafening crescendo. Sans Tardis, Rose and The Doctor begin to appear: Rose standing just a few feet in front of The Doctor. Though they’re mostly hidden behind the wall, they stand at just the right angle to get a peek at the gruesome images on Garcia’s screen.

As soon as they have reached a solid state, The Doctor’s eyes immediately fixate on the crime scene photos. Knowingly, he steps closer behind Rose, wraps one arm around her waist, and the other around her mouth.

As if on cue, Rose’s eyes comprehend the images, and widen in fear and repulsion. We can tell that, if left to her own devices, she would have (understandably) cried out.

Reid’s eyes open just as wide, and he shakes his head frantically, as if doing so will make Rose and The Doctor disappear. It doesn’t, though. He plows one hand through his hair, then tries to focus his attention back on Garcia and the case. The team is still discussing the possible overkill.

JJ chimes in: “That’s a lot of violence … So he’s a sadist. Were there any other victims?”

Garcia’s eyes soften as if she can hear Sarah McLaughlin in the background. “Actually, yes, but not the human variety,” she gulps. “In the last month, six puppies have been suffocated and beaten. And thank God there are no photos, because I draw the line at dead dogs.”

As Garcia speaks, we watch Rose and The Doctor’s faces. The Doctor has lowered his hand from Rose’s mouth, but he still has the other protectively around her. Rose looks dismayed when Garcia mentions the puppies.

“We sure it’s the same guy?” Reid questions, blinking his eyes rapidly and trying not to draw attention to the people in the back of the room.

Garcia has a quick response: “Identical DNA samples were found at all the crime scenes, though it didn’t come up with a match in the CODIS database.”

“It’s all about the power, and he’s just graduated from animals to human victims,” Morgan adds.

“We need to stop him before he goes serial,” JJ suggests with just a flair of drama.

With this, the team instinctively breaks and heads for the doorway. Morgan opens the door for Garcia, then holds it as everybody else files out of the conference room. Reid remains seated at the table, his eyes downcast.

Once everyone has left, Morgan allows the door to close and steps back into the room.

“All right, what’s up?” Morgan asks. “You upset that we didn’t finish hanging with your friends?”

“What?” Reid seems preoccupied. “No. I’m—just—tired. I’m going to get a coffee. I’ll meet you out there.”

Morgan steps closer to Reid and puts his hand on his shoulder. “You sure?” he pries. “It’s not something to do with that girl?”

“What?!” Reid seems offended. “No. I told you, that wasn’t my—I—she—” Reid stammers.

Morgan takes his hand off Reid’s shoulder.

“Whoa, whoa. I’m not trying to get you worked up. I’m just trying to help.”

“Although, now that you mention it,” Reid rests his thumb under his chin, and his eyes begin moving rapidly back and forth as the wheels in his mind turn. “What a coincidence—” he pauses as he continues to reconstruct a memory in perfect detail. “Our last unsub. Garcia compared him to _Doctor Moreau_. And then, with the canicide in today’s case … ” Reid removes his hand from his chin and begins picking at his nails nervously.

“What are you talking about?” Morgan looks confused.

“Canicide, dog killing.” Reid doesn’t skip a beat. “I—I think I need to ask Maeve... ”

“Oooh, so that’s your girl’s name.” Morgan nods, more interested in this detail than its relevance to the case. “She sounds—”

Reid is distracted, though. Rose and The Doctor are still huddling around the coffee corner in the back of the room, and Reid looks increasingly more anxious that Morgan might discover them.

“I’m really sorry, Morgan, but I just can’t talk right now.” Reid’s words are harsh and unconvincing, but his eyes are soft with sincerity. “I’ll meet you out there, and maybe we can talk about it later.”

Morgan holds his hands up in surrender. “If that’s the way you want it,” he gives in, not as much frustrated as disappointed, and backs away. Without another word, he exits the room—finally leaving Reid alone with Rose and The Doctor.

Reid sighs deeply and rises from the chair. He surreptitiously looks both ways before heading to the back corner.

“This is insane!” Reid murmurs.

Rose and The Doctor both reply at once: “That could’ve been a disaster,” The Doctor says. Rose, however, is interested in something else: “If Morgan’s really your best friend, why won’t you talk to him about your girlfriend? Is it something about her book?”

“My book!” Reid exclaims. “Where—did it—?”

“If you haven’t moved it, it’s still back in the Tardis,” The Doctor assures him.

“Really, though,” Rose insists. “The Doctor says there’s something you don’t know about her. And her book is doing _something_ to the Tardis, we know that. What’s her secret?” She pauses, then gestures as if recalling Morgan and Reid’s conversation. “What do you need to ask her?”

“That’s not the issue,” Reid gets defensive immediately. “I need to call her about something completely unrelated—a possible connection between this case and the one we investigated last time.”

“We?” Rose looks to The Doctor skeptically.

“Me and him, I’m assuming. The case with the—” The Doctor makes a sawing motion with his arm “—leg … chopping.”

Reid throws his hands up in the air. “But last time, you were only with me for a few minutes out of the entire case. I have to go catch my plane … What am I supposed to do with you if you keep following me around?”

“Maybe we can help—” Rose begins to speculate, but the timing is just too perfect. He and Rose suddenly begin to get a bit sparkly, and then slowly start to disintegrate just inches away from where Reid stands.

“It’s happening like before, Reid. You haven’t seen the last of us,” The Doctor chirps as he fades away. “We’ll meet you in Miami!”

The moment that they disappear completely, Morgan returns to the conference room and props open the door.

“Reid!” he says sternly. “You coming?”

“What? Oh, yeah. Yes!” Reid responds, and takes a few steps toward the door.

“Weren’t you going to get a drink?” Morgan eyes Reid’s empty hands.

“Uh, no, I … changed my mind,” Reid says weakly. “I don’t have time if I … want to call _her_ first.”

************************************

Somewhere near the BAU’s private runway, presumably just outside of Quantico, Reid cautiously approaches a pay phone outside of a gas station convenience store. The gas station itself has no recognizable brand or name: the peeling sign haphazardly slapped onto the building simply reads “Quik Shop.”

While approaching the Quik Shop, Reid walks past the old, worn gas pumps in the parking lot. These were once painted white with a blue stripe and number, but all the paint is chipping. The convenience store is in similarly bad shape: an unusual amount of old chewing gum has been caked onto its dirty white brick wall.

Crossing the asphalt, Reid now arrives at the narrow island of concrete surrounding the store. He follows the gum-covered wall to the back corner, where the pay phone barely hangs from the wall by a few loose screws. Reid carefully watches his All Star clad feet as he navigates his way over some freshly discarded gum in addition to the dirty black circles that have been flattened onto the sidewalk.

Before picking up the phone itself, Reid looks left and right carefully, like a small child crossing the street. Although many cars whoosh past on the commercial street nearby, there’s no one in the parking lot or at the gas pumps. Reid takes a deep breath, then picks up the scratched up old handset.

We hear the dial tone for only an instant before Reid types in the number. The phone rings once, twice, three times … finally, Maeve picks up on the last tone.

“Hello?” she answers, voice shaking.

“Hi,” Reid’s face lights up. He crosses one foot over the other and tilts toward the wall, as if wanting to get comfortable by leaning against it. Luckily, he glances over to the dirty white brick just in time and immediately recoils.

“Oh! You called again.” Maeve’s voice is hard to read. She sounds excited, but also surprised and worried. “Again, and it’s not Sunday.”

“Yes, I hope that’s OK—” Reid begins, then drums his fingers on his forehead. “I mean, I know you said—but—I need your help with something.”

“You do?”

“Yes!” Reid smiles. “It’s hard to explain, but …” His eyes start moving back and forth as they’re wont to do, not looking at anything but merely processing information in overdrive. “I—I have so many things to ask you about!”

“You know we can’t talk too long, Spencer,” Maeve warns, a spark in her words as she says the first name that nobody calls him. “It’ll look—you know—”

“I know,” Reid is disappointed, but understanding. “I guess the first thing is, this coincidence I noticed with my case. Remember last week, when we talked about _The Island of Doctor Moreau_?”

“I remember that you read it in 14 minutes,” Maeve laughs.

“I could’ve read it in 2 or 3, but I wanted to process it all consciously so I could better discuss it with you,” Reid replies matter-of-factly.

Maeve can’t help but laugh, this time more fully. “OK, so _The Island of Doctor Moreau_. What about it?”

“My last case. The one I was solving last time we talked,” Reid repeats. “The unsub was removing a leg from one victim and attempting to reattach it to the next. Garcia called him a mad vivisector.”

“Because he was performing operations on live patients … and attempting to change their shape?” Maeve pauses briefly to think. “You know, that could just as easily, if not more accurately, be a Doctor Frankenstein instead of a Doctor Moreau.”

A light flickers in Reid’s eyes. “I guess you’re right. But Garcia made the Moreau comparison specifically. She meant it as a joke, but I don’t think it was entirely inaccurate.”

“I don’t understand. You think your killer was actually inspired by Wells’ novel?”

“I didn’t at the time. But now, today’s case. It reminded me of the book again, because this unsub is killing …” Reid hesitates “… puppies.”

“That’s terrible.” Maeve frowns. She sighs. “But—isn’t killing animals part of the, you know, homicidal triad?”

“Along with enuresis and arson.” Reid’s eyes move even more frantically and methodically than before. He has all the pieces to put something together, but just can’t make the connection yet. Unknowingly, he begins murmuring to himself: “With the Cybermen I thought I was thinking of _Jekyll and Hyde_ … which I was, but it was also—”

“Cybermen?” Maeve sounds very confused. “Love, what are you talking about?”

Reid stops everything immediately. At first, it seems like he’s enthralled by her use of the pet name, but in fact, he hasn’t even processed her words yet. He has actually stopped talking because he found the missing piece.

“That’s it! Whitehead’s statue,” Reid declares.

Maeve, impressively, has caught back up with Reid’s idiosyncratic way of thinking. “The sculpture built to commemorate the Brown Dog affair?” she clarifies. “Are we talking about that in relation to your case?”

“Yes. Yes and no. Remind me what you said about the statue the other day?”

“Can’t you … not _not_ remember?”

“Yes, but—” Reid’s voice is loving. “I’d like to hear you say it again. It’ll help me … think.”

“Really?”

Reid hesitates. “Well, I also like listening to your voice,” he says meekly.

“OK, then,” Maeve sounds a little shy. “When we read _The Island of Doctor Moreau_ , we talked about vivisection, and so, we talked about the Brown Dog affair—the controversy that practically divided England from 1903 to 1910. It was triggered by allegations that physiology professor William Bayliss from University College London performed an illegal vivisection on a brown dog, in front of an audience of more than 50 medical students.”

“Right, and you told the story about the statue so excitedly, it was adorable—” Reid gets carried away, looking more and more smitten as he recalls the memory of her intelligence in perfect form.

Maeve sounds so happy to be sharing the history she loves, it would be cute for anyone to listen to. “Antivivisectionists hired the sculptor and stonemason Joseph Whitehead to build a bronze statue in commemoration of their cause, using the brown dog as a symbol of animal cruelty intended to ask—” Maeve gets so excited that her sentence structure ceases to make sense. “ _Men and women of England,_ ” she begins partially quoting the plaque on the sculpture, then comments, “That’s right, they added women! _How long shall these Things be?_ ” Maeve finishes the quotation but continues to comment. “Obviously, their question caused a clash not only among the scientific community and animal rights activists, but also represented suffragettes, trade unionists, and other causes—” Maeve breaks off for a moment.

Reid cradles the phone into his shoulder and holds it a little tighter in his hands. He looks up to the sky as he soaks up her voice.

Maeve continues: “I’m assuming the part of my story that you found so interesting was the way that, when this seemingly innocuous statue of a brown dog was unveiled in Battersea in 1906, it was such a source for controversy, and so frequently vandalized that it had to be put under 24-hour police guard—”

“Battersea!” Reid repeats. He’s excited, and the unconscious effect of Maeve calling him ‘love’ has been slowly sinking into his mind. Without thinking, he blurts out, “Maeve! I love you!”

As soon as he says it, both Maeve and Reid are completely silent. Reid gasps to himself and begins to look frantic.

“I’m sorry. I mean, I—I—” Reid seems unsure what to do.

“Oh.” There is a long silence. “You didn’t mean it?”

“No, I do,” Reid is uncharacteristically impassioned. “God, I do! I just didn’t mean to tell you … like that,” he rushes to correct himself.

“And I didn’t mean to tell you without giving you—” Maeve agrees, but stops. “I wish I could say it more. Or really _to_ you. It’s just too dangerous, with him …”

The unmistakable silence of two high-functioning introverts in love passes between them again. Unbeknownst to each other, they both smile weakly.

“So, Battersea is what you wanted out of all that?” Maeve asks. “That doesn’t exactly tie together your weird story about these … unsubs—”

“That’s just it,” Reid replies. “It ties together another story. A story I wish—” he doesn’t know how to possibly phrase this. “A story you—” he fumbles through his mental archive for some socially acceptable way of discussing his experiences with The Doctor to Maeve.

“OK, so I’m reading this science fiction story. OK?” Reid begins experimentally, over-emphasizing the suggestion that this is a hypothetical situation.

“Sure.”

“And in the story, a … mad scientist is determined to eliminate all disease to save himself from his own terminal illness, and extend human life so that he—and everyone else—can be immortal. He builds these human-shaped bodies out of metal, and … using some of the technology of this … science-fictional world, he brainwashes the entire city into coming to his headquarters in _Battersea—”_

“So, by the entire city, you mean what, South London?” Maeve interjects.

“Um, I guess you could say that,” Reid allows. “Yes. Sure. So, this scientist has his … conversion camp set up at Battersea Power Station, and he uses it make everybody into these cyborg-robots with human brains and steel frames—”

“Sounds like some story!” Maeve is impressed. “Who’s it by?”

“Oh, um, it’s not published yet. My friend is writing it.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. So …” Reid has lost his train of thought.

“So it’s not really that both of your unsubs remind you of Wells’ novel. It’s that _everything_ reminds you of _The Island of Doctor Moreau_.”

“Mostly Moreau. But also _Jekyll and Hyde._ And earlier, when you brought up _Frankenstein_ —I just—something’s connected here. It’s as if all these stories have something to do with nineteenth-century science fiction.” Reid looks intrigued at the very thought.

“You know what I think?” Maeve offers suggestively.

Reid’s response is all too serious and eager: “What!?”

“You’re seeing this stuff everywhere because,” her voice grows tenderly taunting, “you’re _in love with me_.”

“Oh! I—I—hadn’t thought—”

We can tell from the sound of Maeve’s voice that she’s smiling. “You’re a _man of science,_ ” she uses the term facetiously. “Think through it logically. Is there any other probable explanation?”

Reid exhales sharply, as if he wants to tell her the full extent of the improbable things that have been happening, but doesn’t think it wise.

Maeve speaks again: “Just don’t forget that you have people to save. I’d hate to be the clutter in your brain attic that keeps you from solving your cases …” She is flirting now, but also baiting him.

“Well—I—” Reid is having serious trouble responding. “Speaking of mind attics—”

“So you did pick up my Conan Doyle hints. Are you ready to talk about the book yet?”

“Yes! Well, kind of.” Reid’s tone goes from excited, to serious, to worried in just these four words. “I don’t have much time, but I actually wanted to ask you about the particular copy of _The Sign of the Four_ that you leant me.” Reid pauses, but Maeve waits patiently. He hesitates, and his brow furrows in multiple different ways as he searches for a way to rephrase The Doctor’s question. “So, your book … It’s not a … special edition, or a family heirloom, or something … is it?”

“Spencer … are you trying to tell me you lost my book?”

“No, of course not! I could never. It’s just, there’s something unusual about it.”

“Is it all the hearts I drew in the margins?” Maeve says. We can’t tell if she’s serious or not. “Because I promise … That was a long time ago. In college.”

“So you _have_ had the book a while, then?” Reid seems focused on his question rather than Maeve’s implied fictional character crush.

“Just since college. I bought it for a class,” Maeve says casually.

“You sure?”

“Yes. I remember taking nineteenth-century British literature my junior year—the same semester I started my first internship in the genetics lab.”

“If you say so,” Reid seems unsure. “Can you let me know if you remember anything about the book? I promise, it’s important.”

“Spencer …”

“Oh. Right. You can’t …” Reid looks dejectedly to the ground at the thought that Maeve can’t call him on her own volition. Then, he looks anxiously to his watch, and sighs with agitation and regret. “I’m so sorry, and now I’ve gotta go.”

“That’s all right. I like talking literature with you.” We can hear the faintest smile in Maeve’s voice. “Science, too. And I do have the BAU number, in case I ever really need to call …”

“OK. That’s good!” Reid tries to sound hopeful. He moves his mouth as if about to add something else, but hesitates and says something that’s obviously not what he intended: “Stay safe.”

“You too.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Reid looks so happy that he might cry. He pulls the phone away from his ear and hangs up slowly, as if it’s the last thing on earth he wants to do.

************************************

**Title Overlay: MIAMI, FLORIDA**

Reid and Morgan have arrived in Miami. Unexpectedly, they’re not in the “bad side of town” part of the city. They’re in a quiet middle-class suburb. The tan, medium-sized houses have pink tiled roofs and nice front yards lined with mid-rise fences. Palm trees are everywhere.

“They’ve found another body,” Morgan says to Reid as he hangs up his cell phone. “Similar M.O., but done completely different, like he’s suddenly a professional.”

“Are they sure it’s the same guy?” Reid asks.

“Not 100%, but JJ thinks so.”

“Let’s hope we can find something here,” Reid says weakly. With that, they’re both quiet in thought for a while as they continue down the street.

Morgan is wearing a thin, bright blue shirt that looks like very, very soft micro cotton. It’s perfect both for the Miami weather and his amazing body. He also wears sexy designer sunglasses, but as they walk, it’s still clear that he’s alert to their surroundings. He looks around them with each step that they take, keeping his eye on the passing street signs and watching out for any potential clues.

Reid, on the other hand, didn’t have time to change, and looks anxious and preoccupied. In response to the heat, he has taken off his gray blazer, and simply wears the white button-down shirt and tie from earlier. Without all his layers, he looks considerably less put-together than usual, and every time a car goes by, sound of the whooshing engine causes him to un-subtlely dart his eyes toward the street.

As they walk past the fence of one of the houses, a Black Labrador suddenly appears out of nowhere. It rushes up to the fence and starts barking at them. Reid leaps back, startled, and bumps into Morgan.

Morgan laughs. “Somethin’ got you jumpy?” He speaks lightheartedly, but his face shows marked concern. He continues walking, but now, his attention is fixed on Reid rather than the street around them. Like in many quiet suburbs, there are occasional cars on the street, but not very many people walking by.

Reid shakes his head a little too immediately. “No! Nothing.”

Morgan raises his eyebrows, but just at that moment, they arrive at the corner of the street. On the other side, they see a small public park.

“Fairmount Park!” Reid changes the subject. “That’s the location where two of the puppies were found.”

Morgan looks to the upcoming spot and lowers the sunglasses momentarily to read the street signs. He nods his head in affirmation.

“And two others were found over there.” Morgan points down the street one way, then turns to the street perpendicular to theirs. “And the last two down that way.” He pulls the sunglasses back up. “So, what does this tell us about our guy?”

Reid and Morgan continue walking toward the park. As they approach, the neighborhood slowly starts to evolve from a residential area into a more commercial district.

“Looking at the offense cluster, it’s almost statistically impossible for him _not_ to live in this area,” Reid answers.

“You sure? It could just be his hunting grounds.”

As they continue, they walk past a brightly colored storefront with a chalkboard sign in the front listing daily coffee specials. The sign above the store reads: “Coco’s Crepes: Waffles, Coffee, Gelato.”

At that moment, a large city bus passes Reid and Morgan and slows to a stop right in front of the store. It hisses as the doors open, and a small group of teenagers alights from its steps. Laughing and talking among themselves, they walk into Coco’s Crepes.

“Check that out,” Morgan says, deep in thought. His eyes are fixed on the city bus. Reid’s are focused on the Coco’s Crepes sign. “You know what I’m thinking?”

“You’re wondering whether or not they actually sell crepes, because it’s in the name but the listed descriptor is ‘waffles, coffee, gelato’?”

“What?” Morgan takes off his sunglasses with one smooth swipe of his hand, and looks to Reid incredulously. “Focus, Reid!” He sounds like he’s trying to coach baseball again. “I’m thinking that this bus here will probably take us directly through the center of the city, where Amanda Lopez’s body was found.”

“You think?” Reid now looks preoccupied by a building on the opposite side of the street. The large, plain-lettered sign simply says: “Miami No-Kill Pet Shelter.”

“Yeah,” Morgan agrees. Then, he snaps his fingers in front of Reid’s face to get his attention. “We’re onto something here. This could mean that he doesn’t have access to a vehicle, which helps us build our profile.”

Reid’s profiling lightbulb finally turns on, but he doesn’t turn back to Morgan. “So, he starts with dogs in his own neighborhood, then when he works up the courage—” Reid eyes the city bus as it pulls away and continues down the street. “He hops on the bus and finds his first human victim, then rapidly evolves to take his second once he’s had that first experience.”

“Exactly what I’m thinking.”

“All right!” Reid looks back in the direction of the animal rescue building, and widens his eyes in disbelief. “Is that—” he begins mumbling something out loud, but quickly quiets himself.

************************************

In the front window of the Miami No-Kill Pet Shelter, Rose pulls a bright orange apron over her beautiful pink skirt. She twirls around in a circle, then poses for The Doctor with her arms outstretched like jazz hands.

“What’ch’ya think?”

The Doctor takes in her appearance happily. “ _Multo bene_!” he responds. “Though I’m still not quite sure why, of all the things you could do while you’re here, you’ve decided to take care of dogs.”

“Really?” Rose is not amused. “Some horrible person strangles six _innocent_ puppies—and I thought you were supposed to have two hearts!”

The Doctor tilts his head both ways, weighing her insult. “Yes, but I’ve got to find Reid and figure out what to do to stop the _human_ murders …”

“Which you told me not to get mixed up with. So I’m going to stay here and help someone else.” She walks up to a cage with a baby Beagle in it, and picks up the adorable tri-color dog. Its ears are so floppy that they look too big for its face. Rose cradles the dog in her arms like a baby, then turns around so that the puppy’s sleepy-looking eyes look right at The Doctor. “Isn’t that right, you?” she coos to the dog in her sweetest animal-talking voice.

************************************

“What’re you looking at?” Morgan asks, but Reid, eyes still glued to the front of the animal shelter, doesn’t seem to hear him.

“I’ve gotta go!” Reid exclaims, and takes a step toward the street as if he’s about to jaywalk right across it.

Morgan grabs the back of Reid’s shirt and pulls him backwards.

“What do you think you’re doing, Reid?” Morgan demands, the stern but supportive tone still in his words. “Something’s up with you, and I wanna know what it is.”

“It’s nothing—just the case!” Reid responds, and points as convincingly as possible to the Miami No-Kill Pet Shelter. “If there’ve been animal killings in this area, _those_ are the people to ask about it. Someone might’ve seen something.”

Morgan lets go of Reid’s shirt. “If you say so.” He doesn’t sound convinced. He looks across the way to the pet rescue. “That’s not a bad place to start, though.”

“Good,” Reid sounds relieved. “So, the others are at the human dump site, which leaves you and I to investigate the dogs. You canvass the locations where the puppies were found for any witnesses or information, and I’ll go into the animal shelter and check with them.”

“All right,” Morgan allows, and begins to back away. With that, Reid rushes across the street. A few cars are coming, so he has to run across the road in order to make it in time. He gawkily holds his arms flat to his sides, as if trying to make himself smaller so he doesn’t get hit by the traffic.

Once he’s crossed the street, Reid marches up to the building’s front door and bursts into the front room of the animal shelter. The door makes a loud slamming sound as it flies open quickly and hits the wall behind it. Rose, The Doctor, and about a dozen puppies in cages turn to face him immediately. Before Reid even knows what’s happening, The Doctor has pulled his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and aimed it carelessly at the front door like a weapon. Rose, meanwhile, clings to the tiny puppy she’s holding as if protecting it from some serious threat.

“What are you—how did you get in here?” Reid demands.

“Oh, it’s you!” The Doctor lowers his screwdriver. “Gone a little overboard on the entrance there?”

Reid scans the room and his heart immediately melts at the sight of the puppies. Though there are more dogs and supplies in the back of the shelter, the front of the shop is basically a perimeter of particularly cute dogs in chain-link cages, surrounding a small playpen-like area full of dog toys. In the corner of the room is a large, U-shaped information desk with catalogs, paperwork, and a large filing cabinet.

Reid awws involuntarily, and steps toward the dog in Rose’s arms. An instant later, though, he remembers his mission. “You guys are right in the _middle_ of the unsub’s killing zone!” he whisper-shouts, trying to peek behind them to see if anyone else is in the back of the shelter. “How’d you get a job here _and_ get them to leave you in here alone with all these dogs?”

“Well,” The Doctor begins, and reaches into his suit pocket. He pulls out a small, thin black-leather notepad and extends it toward Reid like a police badge. “There’s this!”

Reid looks at it questioningly. We see, from his point of view, that the white paper inside is completely blank.

“Um … what is _this_ , exactly?” Reid eyes the paper suspiciously.

“Psychic paper! I’m the new boss!” Rose declares, and bounces the Beagle up and down in her arms excitedly. The Beagle, which was just about to fall asleep, jolts awake cutely.

Reid steps closer, and takes the bottom half of the paper between his index and middle fingers. “It’s just a plain pad of paper,” he rephrases his complaint.

 “Really?” Rose and The Doctor exchange a surprised look.

The Doctor flips the paper back around and inspects it himself. “Brilliant!” he exclaims as he scans the paper with his eyes. “So, Reid really is the most _genius_ genius around—well, that, or he’s just so incomparably dull that his imagination can’t think of anything to possibly—”

“We’ve already established that,” Reid interrupts, then shakes his head as if thinking to himself. “I mean, the genius part. But seriously, you guys, I know you’re trying to help … but I actually need some information from the people who work here, and now that it’s just _you_ , I’m missing out on a lead!”

Rose steps toward Reid with the puppy and extends her arms, offering to let him hold the precious Beagle.

Reid’s face reveals that he really, really does want to hold the dog, but he’s trying to fight it. “I can’t—guys—I need to focus!” he objects.

“I’m not trying to distract you,” Rose insists. “I’m giving you lil’ Bagel here so that I can help follow your lead. What’ch’ya need, files, records, receipts?”

The room is completely silent for a moment before Reid responds.

“…The dog’s name is _Bagel_?”

“Mmm-hmm. Bagel the Beagle. Now. Take him from me and I’ll get your paperwork. I’ve already been looking round, trying to see if there’s anything here that can help us identify the missing dogs.”

The Doctor folds his arms and gets a proud look on his face.

“I—I just need to know if—” Reid is trying to resist the puppy, which Rose slowly pushes closer and closer to him. As if against his will, Reid gradually raises his arms up and finally takes Bagel from her. His entire expression immediately softens as he holds the Beagle, and then, without thinking, lowers his face against the top of the puppy’s head and gives him a good snuggle.

“So, Reid, what’ll it be?”

“Well,” Reid struggles for a moment to reposition Bagel the Beagle over one of his shoulders, so that he can hold the dog with one hand and reach into his back pocket. After a few seconds, he finally succeeds in this, and pulls out his cell phone at the same exact moment that Bagel nuzzles his nose up and licks Reid’s ear.

Reid lets out a little laugh that’s practically a giggle. “Garcia—” he’s interrupted again as the dog proceeds to sniff his ear, and Reid chuckles and squirms like it really tickles. “Garcia sent me some descriptions of the dogs that were killed. None of them had IDs or were reported missing, and the breeds are all pretty common, so it’s hard to know who they belonged to.”

Reid pulls up the descriptions on his phone and walks over to the information table. He sets the phone down and slides it across to Rose.

“Ooh, great phone!” Rose says as she picks it up and looks at the brightly lit screen. “This FBI-issue?” Reid stares at her blankly, so she continues, “Right, then. Let me get out this month’s paperwork and see if anyone adopted … or _abandoned_ … a dog matching one of these descriptions.”

Rose reaches behind the desk to open a filing cabinet. She deftly flips to a particular file, and pulls out an incredibly thick stack of papers. She turns back to Reid and drops it onto the table with a huge THUNK.

Reid and The Doctor both make an O-shape with their mouths, and The Doctor whistles the falling pitch that communicates ‘that’s a lot of papers.’

“Split that into three stacks,” The Doctor points to the papers. “It looks like we’re all looking through them.”

Rose nods and cuts the stack like a deck of cards. Reid gives Bagel one last scratch behind the ears, and then puts him down in the dog playpen. Bagel looks at the toys for a moment, but then walks around in a circle a few times, coils up, and immediately falls asleep.

The Doctor, Rose, and Reid stand around the information table. They each take a stack of papers, and with occasional glances at the information on Reid’s phone, begin sorting through the recent puppy exchanges.

“If you get any that might match the description, put them off over here.” Rose points to an empty side of the desk.

When Reid finds the first possible match, he looks a bit excited. But, after a few minutes of searching, all three of them begin pulling out multiple papers that could be one of the canine victims. After about 10 minutes, they’ve read through all the stacks, but the pile on the side has dozens of papers in it.

“So … how do we narrow this down?” The Doctor looks to Reid expectantly. Everyone looks at the paper on the top of the possible matches stack.

“Hold on a minute,” Rose grabs the top paper and holds it up. She points to the _Contact Info_ line with a look of amusement and triumph. “Have a look at this!”

Reid and The Doctor both lean in closer. The Doctor reads the information out loud: “Jenny Smith, 305-867-5309.”

The Doctor shrugs, and Reid purses his lips.

“What, seriously?” Rose asks. Then, she begins flipping quickly through the rest of the stack. She pulls out two more papers under Jenny Smith’s name, and then three that have the name _Fred Schneider_ , 305- _606-0842._

“Here’s your missing dogs.” She stacks up all the papers into her hands, then aligns them above the table and straightens them out carefully. Then, she hands them to Reid.

He looks over them carefully. After a second of thought, he gets it. “Oh!” He smiles just a little. “Sorry. The 305s were getting in the way.” Reid looks over to The Doctor and explains: “These aren’t real phone numbers. They’re just from lyrics to 80s songs. The first is Tommy Tutone, and the second is the B52s.”

“There you have it. So, what’s it mean?”

Rose directs the question to Reid, but The Doctor is the first to answer with a grave look on his face. “It means that someone adopted these dogs _just_ to kill them … Now, that doesn’t make any sense, whether you’re _heartless_ or not.” The Doctor casts Rose a playful glare as he says the word ‘heartless,’ then looks over to the sleeping Bagel sweetly, as if to show her that he really does care about the dogs’ safety.

“It also means that he’s not very sophisticated at planning his crimes,” Reid adds. “And he’s very, very nervous about the whole thing. I mean, there are dogs all up and down the street that he could’ve stolen, but yet, he comes to the animal rescue and gets one under legitimate pretenses … only to be too shortsighted to invent a plausible fake phone number. He might be physically or emotionally weak, probably both, and he’s definitely inexperienced. This looks like one of the first crimes of his entire life—I can’t imagine that he’d escalate to murder without some kind of major trigger or push …”

Fueled by the necessity to put this all together with the team, Reid pivots around and heads toward the door, six papers still in hand.

“What are you doing?” Rose sounds a bit offended.

Reid stops briefly and looks over his shoulder. “Oh, sorry! Thanks somuch for your help. I’ve gotta go meet up with Morgan to share these with him.” He holds the papers up in the air. “I think we’re almost ready for the profile.” He continues walking toward the door, and opens it much more carefully on his way out than he did on the way in.

“Wait!” Now, The Doctor calls after him. Reid turns around in the doorway, propping the door open with one elbow awkwardly. The Doctor continues: “We said we would help each other. Shouldn’t I come … help?”

Reid shakes his head. “Morgan’s out there, and since he met you as one of my sci-fi book friends in Quantico, I don’t know what he’ll think if he sees you here now.”

The Doctor gives Reid a pleading look.

“If you want to help, stay here and protect Bagel,” Reid says with a straight and serious face.

Rose interjects: “I’ve got one of the high school students from the volunteer team coming in to help any minute. Me and Bagel can run this side of things all by ourselves, thank you.”

As Rose speaks, something suddenly strikes him. “My team, your team …” he repeats quietly. “That’s it!” He darts back out the door and begins running down the street.

“Reid!” The Doctor calls, but Reid’s mind is made up.

“Should I go after him?” The Doctor asks.

“Go ahead.” Rose gives a swing of her hand as if ushering him out the door, but The Doctor doesn’t leave immediately. He pauses to look at her with a love-struck expression, which she returns. Without warning, he steps toward her, puts both hands on her shoulders, and pulls himself close to her. With his eyes briefly closed, he kisses the top of her head, and lingers there a second. Then, he steps back and looks right at her, their eyes intensely meeting.

“Marvelous job just now,” The Doctor says sincerely. “You’re really something. You know that, Rose Tyler?”

Rose bites her lip and looks at him thoughtfully. She seems to be weighing a decision in her mind.

“Thanks,” she says reluctantly. “Now, go out there and help him save some lives.”

They share a knowing expression of affection for a brief instant. Then, The Doctor’s light eyes sparkle as he remembers something important. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the psychic paper once again.

“You’re gonna need this to keep the place running,” he says, and hands it to her.

“Thank you.” Rose takes the paper from him, and their eyes stay locked for just one more second before The Doctor turns and follows after Reid. He walks relatively fast, but doesn’t run.

************************************

Reid runs almost all the way to the furthest park, dodging all of two people on the sidewalk along the way. As he approaches, he sees Morgan also running toward him. When they meet each other, they stop at the same time, each with urgent information to share. Simultaneously, Reid shouts: “He’s working on a team!” while Morgan says: “He’s a high school kid!”

Meanwhile, The Doctor has almost caught up with them. He’s just close enough to hear them, but far enough that he doesn’t draw attention to himself. When he hears Morgan’s revelation, he immediately turns deathly pale.

************************************

At an Albuquerque P.D. Press Conference, JJ stands in front of the news camera and releases the following information:

_We believe that we’re looking for two white males, one significantly older than the other. The younger unsub lives in the area, most likely a student at a local high school. He’s awkward and quiet, probably unpopular and insecure. The older unsub has taken in this teenager as his way of leaving a legacy. He’s sophisticated, so he’s probably is in his late 30s to early 40s, with violent criminal experience. Look for ex-cons who live or work near an area where young people congregate. Unlike the younger subordinate partner, this unsub is charismatic and easily trusted._

_Don’t underestimate either of them. The ex-con may seem more dangerous, but in any apprentice/master dynamic, there comes a day when the student no longer needs the teacher._

************************************

After Reid and The Doctor leave, Rose gingerly lifts Bagel from his playpen, and carries him back to his cage in the front of the store.

As she closes the metal door for the dog, the front door to the shop flies into the room with a loud rushing sound. Rose whips around to meet the gaze of the young man standing in the doorway.

He is a scrawny, pale high school student, only about 17 years old. He has strawberry blonde hair framing his thin face and pointy nose. Like Rose, he is wearing a bright orange apron that shows he’s a volunteer at the animal shelter.

“Hello! You must be, uh, Toby, yeah?” Rose hurries back to the information table and grabs a clipboard. She skims the list.

“Uh, yeah, that’s me.” His voice is shaky and unsure. “Wait, are you new here? I usually work for Hannah.”

“Well, yes,” Rose fumbles into the pocket of her orange apron and pulls out the psychic paper. She holds it up to Toby like an ID.

“Hollie Sharpe …” Toby reads the papers. “So, you’re the new co-manager.”

Rose looks to the paper, as if pleased with herself, and then folds it back into her apron. “Yep, that’s me! The reason I called you in to help today is because … well, you know, there’ve been reports that some dogs have been killed around here recently, and it’s the job of a place like this to try to stop things like that from happening.”

Toby suddenly looks alarmed. “What?” he asks, then quickly adds, “that’s—that’s … terrible!”

“I know,” Rose says sympathetically. “I’ve gone over some of the paperwork for this past month, and it looks like someone’s been adopting dogs under a false name.” She says the words carefully, not revealing the possible connection between the human and animal murders.

Toby’s countenance shifts from initial shock and alarm to a more dramatic form of upset, not like he’s angry, but more like he’s about to cry. “Y-you think it’s my fault that … someone … took the dogs?” he murmurs, and looks at his feet.

“Oh, no, it’s not that!” Rose adds quickly. “I don’t want to say it’s your fault, or the shelter’s fault, that this happened. But I was thinking that we could update the paperwork system to include a space where we photo-copy the person’s ID and include it in the file—you know, make sure they’re using their real name.” As Rose speaks, she flips through some of the blank example adoption papers that she has on her clipboard. Because of this, she doesn’t realize that Toby is looking more and more panicked. “It’d be some extra work for volunteers like yourself, of course, but I think it could save some lives.”

Toby is still standing in the doorway, and he appears to be in the full throes of panic. As Rose says the words ‘save lives,’ he suddenly looks up directly at her like a deer in the headlights.

“Oh, um, why, I—I don’t know if that—the—changing the paperwork—” Toby stutters, and shoves his hands into his apron pockets.

Rose walks up to him with a look of compassion. “Really, please don’t be upset,” she says soothingly. “We can help these dogs. Stop it from happening again.”

She reaches out to put her hand on his shoulder, but he flinches away from her.

“Hold on,” he blurts out. “I need a second.”

“Of course,” Rose backs away. “Remember, you couldn’t’ve known. Please don’t feel—” she tries to convince him that the animal deaths aren’t his fault, but he walks into the back of the shelter without another word.

“Poor kid,” Rose says. She turns to watch him walk into the back for a moment, where he goes directly into a small employee breakroom. Deciding not to follow, she turns back to the information table. Facing the front of the store, she begins to shuffle through some more papers.

As she sifts through them, we suddenly see Toby looming behind her with a heavy three-hole-puncher in his hand. Rose doesn’t hear him coming. He raises the office-supply-turned-weapon behind her head, then swings it down toward the side of her face.

Everything goes black.

************************************

On the street, Morgan and Reid are discussing where to investigate next, when Morgan’s cell phone begins to ring.

“Talk to me, Baby Girl,” he says in his velvety voice as he picks up the phone.

Since the street around them is quiet except for the occasional car or bus, Reid can overhear Garcia as she talks to Morgan.

“Huge news. Someone just witnessed a crime right near you and Reid. It sounds like it could be related to the murders.”

“What? Where is it?” Morgan’s eyes dart around the nearby buildings as he springs into action.

“Small pet rescue, just down the street. A witness called police and said she saw a young high-school kid dragging a woman out of the animal shelter and …” Garcia hesitates. “And putting her into the trunk of a tan Nissan.”

Reid freezes in terror.

“This just happened?” Morgan seems shocked. “And no one stopped it?”

“Witness was just a teenager. Knew she couldn’t’ve stopped it—”

Reid finally gets a hold of himself, and as everything sinks in, he bursts, without warning, into a run back in the direction he just came from.

“Where’re you going?!” Morgan demands as Reid runs full-speed down the quiet sidewalk.

“Garcia, _tell me_ the witness saw which direction the car went,” Morgan pleads.

“Southbound down Main Street.”

“I’m on it!” Morgan rushes back down the street, heading to the neighborhood where he parked the FBI SUV.

“ _You’re_ on it? Just you? What about Reid?”

Morgan breathes heavily as he runs and answers Garcia’s question at the same time: “Kid was _just_ at the pet store. He started running back there before I could stop him. Looks like he’s going back to check the scene of the crime while I take this guy down.”

“By your—” Garcia begins to object, but Morgan hangs up.

************************************

Reid bursts into the pet rescue for the second time in a very short span. As he enters the scene, we see The Doctor angrily leaning over the information table. Papers are scattered all over the nearby area, and Bagel the Beagle is whimpering in his playpen.

The Doctor dabs his finger on the table, then turns around to Reid with fury blazing in his eyes. He holds up his finger, which has the slightest smudge of bright red smeared on it.

“Blood. There’s blood!” he shouts. “Where is she?!”

Reid looks just as worried, but taps into his FBI instincts to stay slightly calmer.

“Witnesses called in. They said they saw a high school kid hoisting a blonde woman into the trunk. Morgan’s going in the direction of the car, while we can—”

“Into the what?”

“The trunk of the car. The, um … the boot. We have to—” Reid speaks quickly, trying to get ready to plan their course of investigation and action.

As The Doctor responds, he gets progressively louder with each staccato sentence. “In the boot. They stuffed her _into the boot_.” There is a long pause as the flame within him rages into a wildfire. “He took her, he hurt her, and this makes things simple. Very, very simple.” His unrestrained anger becomes palpable in the room. “Do you know why?”

“Why?” Reid looks concerned.

“Because now, _Spencer Reid_ , there’s no power on this earth that can stop me.”

************************************

In the FBI SUV, Morgan drives recklessly through the streets while talking to Garcia on the phone.

“Come on, Hot Stuff, don’t say we’ve lost him!” Morgan shakes his head. “This son of a bitch takes someone right out from under my nose, I’m gonna find him and stop him.”

“The last witness report of the tan Nissan put him at the corner of Twelfth and Main,” Garcia responds. “I don’t know what else to tell you right now, but I’m on it, I’m—”

Morgan slams his hands on the steering wheel and accidentally honks the horn in frustration.

************************************

We fade into a dark, damp-looking room. It seems to be some kind of abandoned workshop for boat maintenance.

Rose’s mouth is duct taped, and her hands are also duct taped together around a huge wooden pole behind her, binding her in place. A few feet away, there’s a row of wooden planks that look like they were once pieces of boats. There’s also a huge, bloody bruise on the side of her face, and mascara runs down her cheeks. Panic and tears fill her eyes.

Toby stands nearby, talking to a physically-fit middle-aged man with short brown hair. The man looks upset.

“Nice, huh?” Toby brags. “Just like you showed me.”

“What the hell are you doing, trying this without me?” the older man demands.

“Dude, it’s Hollie!” Toby replies with enthusiasm. “She’s the new boss at work—”

“What?” The man grabs Toby’s shoulders. “How many times have we been over this? Never somebody you know, and never near where you live!”

“I had to!” Toby defends himself. “She figured out that I’d faked those adoption papers at work so that I could practice on the dogs—”

The man looks around the room, then has another realization. “And that was your work’s donated car you brought her here in? What were you thinking?”

Toby doesn’t respond.

The man groans, long and loud. “I should’ve known you’d get caught for that dog-killing bullshit. Look what it’s gotten us into!”

“No. This is what she _gets_ for trying to stop me.” Toby looks horrifyingly excited. “We get to kill her now, and then we can get rid of her like it never happened.”

“ _We_ are not doing anything. _I’m_ going to take her out and get rid of her. _I’ve_ got to take care of this to save both our asses. Now you go clean her car, and when I say clean, I mean clean!”

“What? That’s not fair. She’s mine!”

“No, no, no. The second you brought her here to myshop, she became mine.”

As the two accomplices dissolve into arguing, we pan over to Rose, who is assessing the situation. While she’s still noticeably disturbed, she is now looking down at the ground, deep in thought. We pan around the pole that she’s tied to, and see that she’s felt out a small nail sticking out of the post. Stealthily, she starts rubbing her hands up and down in order to saw at the tape that binds her.

************************************

Still furiously driving the FBI SUV with the siren wailing, Morgan is driving down a small alley in an attempt to find the unsub on his own. His phone rings, and he answers immediately.

“You got him?”

“Based on the witness description, we’ve identified the kid as 17-year-old Toby Whitewood. We got into his cell phone records and he’s been in touch—and I mean _a lot_ in touch—with ex-con David Roy Turner.”

“Where are they?”

“Turner has an old boat repair shop—that’s JJ’s best guess at where they’d take a victim. I’m texting you the info, but—”

“But what, Garcia?” Morgan looks exasperated.

“You and Reid are the closest, but it’s still several miles away. And he’s already got a head start on you, and if it’s just the apprentice he could’ve taken her somewhere else—”

“You text this stuff to Reid, too?”

“Yes, all of it. But he hasn’t responded—”

“Then don’t worry. Between the two of us, _someone_ will get there in time.”

************************************

In the pet rescue, Reid receives Garcia’s text message.

“All right! They’ve got a possible location.” He steps toward The Doctor and shows him the unsub’s name, and the possible address, on his phone.

“Oh, watch out _Toby_ , I’m coming for you …” The Doctor sounds seriously threatening.

“H-how?” Reid hesitates to ask. “Can we use your, uh—” Reid struggles.

Without warning, The Doctor makes an indescribable groan and shoves both of his hands onto his head. “You!” he shouts. “It’s all your fault!”

“What?”

“The Tardis is tangled up with you. That’s what got her hurt and that’s why I can’t—We should be able to—But I can’t control the Tardis or make it go where I want, and I _swear_ if anything happens—!”

Reid takes a step back from The Doctor and takes a deep breath, motioning for him to do the same.

“We’ll figure it out. Between the two of us, there has to be a way. If we just reason it out—”

“Reason? You expect me to reason when her blood is literally _on my hands_ —and yours?” The Doctor holds up his finger, which is still smudged with red. “Imagine if this was _Maeve_ ’s blood …”

At the sound of her name, Reid gulps with anxiety, knowing all too well how real the possibility of The Doctor’s suggestion could be.

“I—I—”

As if on cue, Bagel whimpers from his cage. Reid looks back to the dog, and when he makes eye contact with the adorable animal, something clicks.

“… Beagles belong to the hound group …” he says to himself. “Traditionally used for hunting and tracking …”

The Doctor narrows his eyes at Reid in frustration “What are you on about?” he shouts.

“And _Toby_ , it’s just too—” As Reid makes the connection, his body suddenly begins to flicker.

“Oh-ho!” The Doctor exclaims, and leaps toward Reid. He puts both hands on Reid’s shoulders. “Have you found a way to get to her?”

“Maybe—” Reid begins.

“You can control this thing?” The Doctor gasps. The flickering becomes more intense.

Reid, in response puts both of his hands on The Doctor’s shoulders. “No. But I just thought about the connection, which also seems to make us … move.”

The room around them begins to go white.

“What’s that?” The Doctor yells over the high-pitched ringing that now fills his ears. “What’s the connection?”

“ _The Sign of the Four_!” Reid replies. Both men cringe and disappear.

************************************

Meanwhile, the argument between Rose’s two captors is escalating.

“I should’ve trusted my gut!” the older man, who we now know is David, yells. “You’re just a loser who doesn’t have the smarts for this kind of thing!”

“You’re the ex-con hanging out with kids, and I’m the loser?” Toby demands.

“Get out of here. I’m tired of cleaning up after you!” David’s face is red as he continues yelling.

Toby turns to walk away in anger. Rose has been waiting for this opportunity of having both of their backs turned. Behind David, she rises to her feet with one of the thick wooden planks from the boats in her hand. With the same strength she used while wielding the baseball bat, she cracks it through the air straight into David’s head. He falls to the ground in a limp pile.

Immediately, Toby turns around to face her. Rose grasps the wooden plank more tightly, and looks at Toby right in the eye. They stare each other down.

“Come at me, bitch,” Toby dares her, filled with confidence for what might be the first time in his life.

Unblinking eyes filled with determination, Rose steps toward him. However, as she does, Toby reaches behind his back and pulls a small silver gun. He points it at her with a cynical smile.

At that exact moment, a flash of bright light starts pulsing within the room. Reid and The Doctor suddenly begin to materialize right next to Rose. This seizes Toby’s attention, and he looks to her side in confusion.

As soon as he loses focus on his weapon, Rose screams and raises the wooden plank high up in the air, slamming it across the side of Toby’s face just like she did with David. As she does so, Toby lets go of the gun, which flies off to the side of the room. It spins across the floor, where it smashes into David’s twitching body.

Without even a second to react to the blow, Toby falls to the ground.

The bright light finally dissolves, leaving Reid and The Doctor in their fully materialized forms just as the danger subsides.

“Doctor!” Rose cries. She rushes toward him, but right as she takes her first step, David grabs Rose’s ankle and pulls her to the floor like a crocodile bringing down an antelope. He has silently regained consciousness in the heart of the chaos.

Fear and confusion fill Rose’s eyes. She reaches out toward The Doctor as she falls straight to the ground, almost in slow motion.

Rising to his knees, David pulls Rose up against him and wraps one muscular arm around her neck. With the other hand, he grabs the nearby gun and points it directly at The Doctor and Reid.

As this is happening, both Reid and The Doctor come to awareness of their new surroundings, and immediately see Rose and her attacker. As soon as they do, both grab their weapons: Reid draws his gun, and The Doctor pulls out his screwdriver.

“Drop your weapon!” Reid yells, doing his best impression of the Morgan takedown.

“I’ve been to prison,” David replies in an even tone. “And I’m not going back.”

He tightens his grip around Rose’s neck, and she begins to choke. As she gasps for air, she reaches up with both hands to claw at David’s bicep, but he remains solid and unfazed by her resistance.

“Let her go!” The Doctor orders.

David tightens his grip once again, and stares down the screwdriver that The Doctor holds. “What is that thing, a Taser?” he laughs. Then, he stares down the barrel of Reid’s gun. “Here’s how this is gonna go. Both of you put your weapons down. Because if you shoot me, I shoot you. And if you keep waiting to shoot me, and I strangle her. It’s a win-win for me here.”

Rose cries beneath his grasp.

“Doctor, we have to—” Reid looks to The Doctor pleadingly, knowing that statistically, law enforcement standoffs usually end with at least one person dead.

Suddenly, we are aware of the sound of approaching sirens. In the few seconds that Reid is speaking, they become devastatingly loud.

“Nope, not a Taser!” The Doctor yells. Drawing force from the loud wailing sirens, he swings the screwdriver around, points it directly at David’s gun, and activates a strong sonic wave pulse, which inexplicably knocks the gun out of the convict’s hand. Shocked, David also inadvertently lets go of Rose as he looks to his empty hands in wonder.

We hear approaching footsteps for an instant before the door to the repair shop flies open. Morgan is standing in the doorway with his gun drawn.

“FBI!” he shouts. He looks momentarily surprised as he sees Reid, but his training keeps him focused on the scene.

David is thrown off guard by Morgan’s appearance, and freezes up. Rose scrambles along the floor to get away from him, but doesn’t yet have the strength to rise to her feet.

Morgan eyes Reid, whose gun is still drawn, spots the unsub’s gun across the room, and Reid in return gives him a slight nod. With that, Morgan jumps onto David, taking him easily to the ground. He gets the man’s hands behind his back and into handcuffs before anybody can blink.

As the situation diffuses, Reid suddenly looks to the place where The Doctor was once standing with concern. However, as if by magic, he’s nowhere to be seen.

Realizing that there’s no one to comfort her, Reid rushes to Rose’s side, where he helps her up from the ground. Her face is still bloody and her beautiful skirt is dirty and ripped. Reid unsurely attempts to offer his support, but all she can do is grab his wrists pleadingly.

“Where is he?” Rose sobs, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Where’d he go?”

************************************

In a small meeting room at the Miami Police Station, Rose is still disheveled, but the wound on her head is cleaned and bandaged. She sits across from JJ and signs her name across the bottom line of a witness statement. When she does, she and JJ exchange documents: JJ returns the psychic paper without question as Rose hands in her signature.

“Please, Miss Sharpe, be in touch with the Miami P.D. if there’s anything they can help you with. Further medical treatment, counseling …”

“I’ll be all right, thanks,” Rose says unconvincingly.

Morgan and Reid stand behind the glass, looking in at the room.

“Are you sure she doesn’t look familiar to you?” Reid seems utterly perplexed.

“Yeah, positive. I mean, for a second there she reminded me of _someone_ , but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Why you so curious? She remind you of … _someone_?” Morgan suggests.

“Uh … sure.” Reid answers with a questioning intonation.

“The only thing I really don’t understand is how that … undercover cop disappeared?” Morgan says skeptically. “Victim seemed to really want him to come back.”

“Must’ve just been the trauma,” Reid explains. Then, he does his best to lie, reminding Morgan of his story: “The, uh, guy was right outside of the pet rescue when I ran back. I told him what had happened and he sprang into action—showed me his badge, we jumped into his car and—”

“And you got here before me?”

“We got here before you.”

“And he helped you disarm both the unsubs?”

“No, that was all R—” Reid almost says her name, and tenses up as he corrects himself. “That was all Hollie, really.”

“But who _was_ the cop? Where’d he go?” Morgan asks. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know,” Reid tries to sound convincing. “He might come forward later tonight. Maybe he was from another department, or maybe, I mean, again, I don’t know …”

“Whatever you say.” Morgan shakes his head.

As Rose gets cleared to leave the police department, Reid excuses himself. He takes a back exit through the building, and walks all the way around to join Rose at the front.

************************************

When Rose comes out the front door of the police department, she looks sad and lost. She hugs herself with both hands as if she’s freezing cold in the Miami sun, and glances around the parking lot forlornly.

However, right across a quiet street from the large, mint-green building, there’s a small park, well-shaded by many varieties of small trees. Underneath one of these trees, just beyond the edge of perception to most people, there’s a bright blue Police Box. The Doctor stands in front of its doors, watching the entrance to the police station desperately.

He steps forward and sees Rose first, facing away from him. But as he gazes on her side profile, she turns toward him. Their glances meet, and she smiles in relief. He begins walking toward her.

Her eyes soften. He smiles, so happy that tears are in his eyes. He walks faster.

She keeps smiling, and now he rushes to her. She rushes to him. They both reach out for each other at the same moment, and as The Doctor pulls her into his embrace, she puts her arms up around his shoulders. He picks her up and spins her in a circle, much like he did earlier in the morning. Except this time, the stakes are so much higher. This time, he almost lost her.

They stop spinning, but he continues to hold her. As if she can read his mind, Rose squeezes The Doctor tighter, like she’ll never let go.

************************************

Reid makes it around the building just in time to witness the scene. After giving them a few moments together, The Doctor sets Rose down. Reid shyly approaches.

“So, what are we doing now?” Reid asks. “This is kind of—different—than the last time we—”

“I’m going to go inside and, um, clean up,” Rose says, and points to the Tardis. Both Reid and The Doctor nod in agreement. They follow Rose back to the park, but stop outside of the Police Box.

As soon as the door closes behind Rose, The Doctor suddenly grabs Reid by the collar of his shirt and slams him against the Tardis doors.

“This. has. to. stop.” The Doctor grits his teeth.

Reid holds up both hands in surrender. “What?”

“You, phone up your girlfriend. We’re getting to the bottom of this _Sign of The Four_ entanglement today. We’ve had some fun, but now it’s gotten too dangerous. How dare you—”

“Me?” Reid demands. “You put your girlfriend in the same kind of danger every day yourself! Have you forgotten the Cyb—”

“She’s not my—” The Doctor interrupts, but can’t even complete the sentence.

Even though The Doctor is still holding Reid threateningly against the Tardis doors, Reid actually begins to laugh. His chuckle is quiet at first, but in a few moments, he reaches real, loud laughter.

“What’s the matter with you?” The Doctor demands.

“You know, for a ‘Time Lord,’ if that’s what you really are, a doctor of all time and space, you’re a complete idiot.”

Instead of getting more upset, The Doctor lets Reid’s collar go. He seems to know what Reid is implying, but allows Reid to continue.

“She _is_ your girlfriend, and you love her,” Reid says with an honest softness.

“Yes I do.” The Doctor gulps. “But it’s too dangerous—it’s impossible—”

“Maybe, maybe not. You’ll never know until you try …”

“… says the man who, by his own admission, still knows relatively little about his _special lady_. So little, in fact, that he hasn’t even told me how little he knows.”

Reid sighs. “We’ve never met. I’ve never seen her. We only talk on the phone on special days, and I use secret numbers, so that her stalker—”

“Her secret’s a _stalker_? You’re FBI! That should be an easy fix—”

“She won’t let me. I’ve tried. She says—”

The Doctor anticipates Reid’s words and they both repeat together: “ _It’s too dangerous._ ”

“You know, they say fear never conquered anything,” The Doctor replies. “You don’t want your life with her to be like this. And I can’t let my life with Rose be like _this_ either. Helping Maeve is the only way for any of us to be safe.”

“I—I guess you’re right,” Reid answers quietly, and looks down at his shoes.

“Now, let’s give her a call!” The Doctor pats Reid on one shoulder encouragingly.

“Right now?”

“Sure. Come inside the Tardis. I can put your mobile into the console and scramble the signal—really, it’ll be just like using a pay phone. Might even be able to throw the ol’ stalker off by placing the call from London.”

Reid purses his lips nervously. “All right.”

************************************

As the episode fades into its closing shots, we hear a voice other than Reid’s recite the closing epigraph for the first time. The voice is Maeve’s, and she recites the words emotionally as we watch Rose, presumably in a bathroom inside the Tardis, peel the thick white bandage off of her face. She winces in pain, and dabs at the clotted blood while Maeve reads:

_O days and hours, your work is this,_

_To hold me from my proper place,_

_A little while from his embrace,_

_For fuller gain of after bliss._

_—Alfred, Lord Tennyson._

************************************

Moments later, Reid and The Doctor stand inside the Tardis. The Doctor hooks Reid’s phone into the system, and it begins to ring on speaker.

It rings once.

It rings twice.

It rings three times.

The phone stops ringing. Flaming red light blasts through the cylinder that fuels the console, and the Tardis begins to shake violently.

“Hello?”

The voice isn’t Maeve’s.

************************************

_Author’s voiceover:_

**_Next time, on Doctor Spencer … Who? Episode 4, “The Fallen Planet” …_ **

_The inexplicable connection between Reid and The Doctor takes a hellish turn when the Tardis transports to a base that teeters on the edge of a black hole. The Doctor and Reid mix theoretical physics and sci-fi science to try and save the planet, but in the process, Reid gets trapped with something that claims to be the Devil itself … and also claims to bear a deadly prophecy._


	4. The Fallen Planet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The inexplicable connection between Reid and The Doctor takes a hellish turn when the Tardis transports to a base that teeters on the edge of a black hole. The Doctor and Reid mix philosophical physics and sci-fi science to try and save the people on the planet, but in the process, they encounter a powerful energy that seems to be the Devil itself … and also offers Rose a deadly prophecy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for waiting and continuing to R&R! I won Nanowrimo tonight at 54K, but will continue to post chapters until the story is done. I won't abandon it, so keep checking back, or better yet -- subscribe!

“Hello?” The voice that answers Reid’s cell phone call isn’t Maeve’s. In fact, it’s so distorted that it doesn’t even sound human.

Reid and The Doctor look shocked and panicked as the Tardis continues shaking. The Doctor grabs onto the console and examines the flaming chamber anxiously. “Hello? Who’s this?” he yells.

“Hell … oh! Hell … oh! Hell … ha ha ha!” The voice roars.

We hear a woman’s scream amid the chaos; it sounds like it’s coming from within the Tardis. The shaking inside becomes less extreme over the course of a few seconds before the earthquake-like effect levels off.

Once the shaking stops, the red flames disappear, and the cell phone connection is lost.

A brief moment of uncertainty passes between Reid and The Doctor. They look at each other, each with the same mouth-partially-agape expression of confusion, when suddenly, they’re interrupted.

“What’s going on?” Rose’s voice fills the room. She has emerged from one of the Tardis’s many chambers to investigate.

Reid immediately puts a hand over his eyes and averts his face. Rose, who must have been in the middle of taking a shower, is wrapped in a fluffy Tardis-blue towel. Her hair, which is darker when wet, hangs down around her face in natural-looking waves like a model at a beach photoshoot.

The Doctor’s face immediately goes blank. He looks at her for only a second before meeting her gaze and biting his lip.

“Oh, come on!” Rose realizes the source of their awkwardness. “I was in the shower, and all of a sudden, no cold water—it’s burning me up and the whole place is shaking!”

Reid continues to shield his eyes with his hand. “No cold water? That’s unusual, usually it’s no hot—”

As Rose talks, The Doctor begins to look up and down the walls of the Tardis with concern in his eyes. Slowly, he starts to pace in a circle, and then walks over to one particular Tardis wall. He reaches out to touch it, then leans in close and puts his cheek against it, like he’s listening to a heartbeat.

“What’ch’you doing?” Rose interrupts her own train of thought to ask. She bunches up the blue towel with her hands and wraps it a little closer around herself.

Reid continues to shield one side of his face while directing his attention to The Doctor.

“The Tardis doesn’t feel quite right,” The Doctor replies, with his hand still caressing the Tardis wall. “She’s sort of queasy. Indigestion, like she didn’t want to land.”

“She?” Reid asks.

“Long story, but true,” Rose answers quickly.

“But I guess it makes sense …” The Doctor continues his train of thought to himself. “If she didn’t want to come here …”

“If she … if we … didn’t want to come, then why did we?” Reid sounds frantic and confused. “I called Maeve! So what in the world—!” At the thought of Maeve, he lowers his hand, albeit only to grab at his cell phone. He pulls it from the console, and scrolls through the screen quickly. Everything seems to be working as normal. He frowns.

“That’s just it,” The Doctor replies, and removes his hand from the wall. He turns to face Reid, and gestures toward his phone. “The Tardis came because she was _called_ ,” he comes to his conclusion ominously.

“She— _The Tardis_ —was called?” Rose asks.

“Yes.”

Reid, still scrolling through his phone, goes to his call history, where we see that his phone really did make an outgoing call just minutes ago. “I dialed Maeve’s number, but … somebody else called us while it was going?”

“Exactly,” The Doctor answers. “And they wanted us to come here.”

“So, should we try to leave?” Reid looks up, where he sees Rose still in her towel. He abruptly looks back down again. “Does that mean it’s unsafe?”

“No,” The Doctor and Rose both answer at once.

“I’ll get changed, then,” Rose adds, meeting eyes with The Doctor for an instant. He quickly averts his gaze, though more tactfully than Reid.

Now, Rose turns her attention to Reid even though he won’t look at her. “To answer your question: no, we shouldn’t leave. It’s not _not_ unsafe, being here. But we should try to find out _why_ we were called.”

Rose turns around, and exits in the direction that she came.

Reid breathes a sigh of relief and repeats under his breath, “not _not_ unsafe?” he goes over the words in his head. When he realizes what the triple negative implies, he and The Doctor lock eyes for a brief, tense instant. The Doctor looks playful and amused, but doesn’t say anything. They wait quietly for Rose to come back.

In just a few minutes, Rose returns. Her hair is still wet, but now she’s wearing a bright pink asymmetrical jacket and a pair of flare True Religion jeans in a light denim wash.

“Have you looked outside yet?” Rose points to the Tardis doors.

The Doctor shakes his head.

“Well, come on, then!” Rose leads the way. The Doctor and Reid both perk up to follow her. She pushes the Tardis doors open and steps outside first. The men follow, but when they step outside, all three of them squeeze in close around the Tardis doors.

We see the place where they’ve landed from an extremely high Dutch-angle. The group of time travelers has stepped into a cramped industrial space that looks like a closet: the walls around them are steel with yellow trim, the floor beneath them looks like a ventilation grate, and stacks of metal boxes are piled up high around them on all sides.

“D’y’think we’ve landed inside a cupboard?” Rose suggests.

Reid chuckles nervously. The Doctor smiles, shakes his head, and says, “Let’s find out.”

The Doctor steps toward the door in front of them, and it opens automatically. A computerized female voice announces above them: “Open Door 15.”

They step through the door, where we see a much bigger room. It’s still industrial and looks similar to the cupboard, except that there are a few olive green metal chairs and benches in this room. Past these, directly across from the group, is another door, presumably to the next chamber.

On the wall right next to this door, we see the words _WELCOME TO HELL_ written in what looks like black spray-paint graffiti. Beneath this, there is a sequence of illegible writing that looks vaguely Asian and very ancient.

“Hell,” The Doctor anxiously repeats the word that the phone voice said.

“Interesting …” Reid murmurs to himself, and takes a step toward the writing. He squints at it, then continues casually, “I don’t suppose either of you are fluent in a wide variety of Indic abugidas …”

“What?” The Doctor asks. Then, he sees the writing that Reid is looking at. The Doctor furrows his brow and looks to Rose with concern. “That’s weird,” The Doctor continues, “It won’t translate.”

“But I thought the Tardis translated everything? Shouldn’t it be in English?” Rose responds.

“The Tardis translates everything?” Reid looks flabbergasted. He scratches his gorgeous head of hair and marvels at the very thought. “I don’t understand. Does it have some kind of software? Is it image-based, or based on phonetic recognition—”

“It’s not worth asking,” Rose shakes her head. “No one really knows.”

Reid, at the idea of the Tardis’s abilities, makes the same facial expression that he often does when he’s impressed with Maeve’s wealth of knowledge.

“But if she can’t translate it … That must mean it’s old. _Impossibly_ old,” The Doctor adds, carefully approaching the words on the wall. He pulls his glasses out of his suit pocket and puts them on to better examine the writing.

“Not really impossibly,” Reid disagrees. Now, he joins The Doctor in stepping right up to the writing. Unlike The Doctor, though, he doesn’t hesitate to reach out and touch the symbols with his index finger. Just a bit of paint rubs off on his hand. “I’d place this writing system around the eighth century, if it’s from earth, and these particular letters …” he looks at the black smudge on his fingertip “… around two hours ago.”

The Doctor looks at Reid incredulously and takes his glasses off dramatically in disapproval. “Hold on just a minute! The Tardis can’t understand this, but you’re saying you can identify it with just one thought?”

“Not exactly _one_ thought.” Reid explains very quickly, “Actually, the first thing I thought was that the jagged characters look like Klingon. Klingon has jagged letters because it was based loosely on the Tibetan alphabet, whose sharp orthographic forms were deemed suitable to mirror the Klingons’ love of pointed weapons. From there I compared my knowledge of the Tibetan writing system to the symbols here, which are clearly alphasyllabic—that means consonant-vowel sequences written as a single unit—that much is evident based on their groupings. But, if you look closely, these symbols run vertically rather than left-to-right. _So_ , the language looks like Tibetan but isn’t Tibetan, which means it must be one with similar features, particularly those typical of a language that’s also both Indic and an abugida. Now, if any of us knew a wide variety of these, we might have a shot at reading what it says.”

“Wow.” The Doctor raises his eyebrows.

“Or maybe it just says _welcome to hell_ ,” Rose offers.

She laughs lightly at her own joke, but before Reid can say anything else, we hear the computerized female voice once again: “Open Door 16.”

Reid, Rose, and The Doctor all dart their attention to the next nearby door, which opens automatically and very quickly. Standing in the doorway is a group of at least half a dozen bizarre alien creatures. Though their bodies are human-shaped and wearing nice gray suits, their faces are cephalopodic, with bulbous foreheads, far-apart eyes, and a untidy mass of what looks like pink linguini dangling down from some orifice where their mouths should be.

Reid loses all color in his face, and fails to blink for an uncomfortable amount of time.

“Oh, hello!” The Doctor greets them cordially. “So, where are we? I was thinking some kind of base, looking at the infrastructure—”

“We must feed,” the creatures begin, but only seconds later, they finish with, “you, if you are hungry.” Interestingly, since they don’t have proper mouths, they seem to be speaking through small orbs that they hold in their right hands. These orbs, which glow with each syllable that they speak, are connected to their linguini-like faces through small tubes.

“Ahh, yes, I thought you looked like Ood!” The Doctor smiles and turns to his two friends. Rose looks curious, whereas Reid remains so stiff that it looks like he’s forgotten to breathe.

“Rose, Reid, these are the Ood. They’re a naturally peaceful servant race for humankind circa the …” The Doctor looks at Reid nervously, then finishes the sentence quiet and haltingly “…forty-second century.”

“Servant race?” Rose sounds offended and confused.

“F-forty second?!” Reid sounds confused for a completely different reason. He begins blinking rapidly, and reaches out to the wall next to him as if trying to avoid falling over.

Suddenly, an alarm beeps frantically.

“You must prepare for impact,” one of the Ood says. “Please allow us escort you through Door 16.”

“Impact?!” The Doctor looks left to right frantically. “What are we colliding with?”

The Ood part down the middle like the Red Sea and extend their arms to usher Rose, Reid, and the Doctor through Door 16. They follow the group inside, and then stand in a corner, quiet and unmoved, as the rest of the scene unfolds.

As we follow everyone into this large room, we see that it’s much like the traditional “bridge” of a spacecraft. There is a captain’s chair in the middle of the space which faces a wide, closed window. In front of the chair is a large desk with a computer-like touch screen surface. Around the perimeter of the room are workstations for various officer positions. One appears to be something archaeological—it’s covered in scattered pages of strange writing like what we saw earlier. The other looks like some kind of science center, with diagrams, equations, and photographs of various astrological phenomena. Along the furthest wall, there is a row of several doors, presumably to other compartments in the base.

There are three people in this room when our protagonists arrive: one slightly pirate-looking man with rich black hair sits in the captain’s seat; another tall, thin man stands to his left looking a bit ill; and a blonde woman hovers over the captain’s right shoulder. All three of them look up in shock and amazement when Rose, Reid, and the Doctor enter.

“People!” the woman shouts. “Real people!?”

“Where’d they come from?” the thin man asks, and darts his eyes back to the Ood nervously.

“Grab onto something quick, everyone!” the captain orders.

“Grab on?” Rose shouts. “To what?”

“Anything. Hurry!”

Reid looks around the room frantically, and spots a bit of piping coming out of the floor along the nearest wall. He jumps down and crouches next to it, grabbing on with full commitment. Similarly, the man and woman next to the captain dart to the perimeters of the room and grab onto other exposed pipes, but there aren’t that many stable-looking objects in the room.

Rose and The Doctor both look around, watching all the others find safe places, and practically hyperventilating with worry. When they realize that nothing remaining looks particularly safe, they make eye contact for a split second, and then instantly grab onto each other in fear like Scooby Doo characters.

A loud rumbling fills the room, jostling things about severely. As it shakes, The Doctor cups his hand over Rose’s head and pulls her down to the ground with him, so that they’re both crouching like Reid. The Doctor leans over her protectively, and tries to brace himself as stably as he can.

“Keep hoooolding on!” the woman shouts, the tremors causing a low vibrato in her voice. As the rumbling gets even louder, the sound of breaking metal joins the cacophony. “It’s a major one!”

The sounds of destruction continue all around them.

“Quick! Bring up the schematics!” the woman shouts.

“I’m on it!” says the man in the captain’s chair. He pulls up a digital blueprint of many long tunnels. “It’s coming through Storage Six …” he says. Expertly, he touches a series of buttons on the computer, which causes one of the tunnels to fall away. The whole room shakes violently for several seconds in response.

After this, the shaking subsides, and when it does, the captain wastes no time. “All right, then.” He rises from his seat. “Who are you, and how did you get onto my base?” He approaches Rose, Reid, and The Doctor sternly.

The Doctor and Rose quickly stand up, and Rose pulls down her pink jacket to better reach down to the top of her hips. “My name’s Rose. Rose Tyler. And this is The Doctor, and Spencer Reid.” As she introduces The Doctor, he also tugs on the front of his suit jacket, as if straightening himself out to look a bit taller and better. His brown pinstripes, though, look the same as always.

Reid looks a little overwhelmed, and holds his hand up in an almost-wave. “Call me Reid,” he amends Rose’s intro.

“All right, then. Rose, Doctor, and Reid.” The captain nods to each of them in turn. “I’m Zachary Cross Flane, Captain.”

“And I’m Ida Scott, science officer,” the woman speaks now, and tucks one of her blonde curls hair behind her ear. “And he’s Toby Zed, archaeology,” she tosses her head toward the thin man, who now looks very, very ill.

Reid cocks his head when Ida says Toby’s name. Inaudible to everyone else in the room, he repeats questioningly: “Another Toby …?”

Meanwhile, Ida finishes speaking: “As for Zach, he’s not as scary as he’s trying to look.”

Zach looks to the newcomers with skepticism in his dark brown eyes. “Yeah, fine then. Intros are done. So, _how’d_ you get here?”

“Well, it’s a long story. But let’s just say my ship … malfunctioned, and, it’s really small, so it’ll fit anywhere. We parked behind—” The Doctor looks to Rose. “What was it? Door 15?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Reid confirms quickly and automatically.

Ida and Zach exchange a sudden look of concern.

“What? What’s that for?” The Doctor senses that something is amiss.

“In order to divert the quake, unfortunately, we just lost—” Zach begins, and points toward the door that the Ood led everybody through. Before he can finish his sentence, The Doctor rushes toward Door 16, panic-stricken.

When he stands in the doorway, the computerized female voice simply recites: “No base infrastructure beyond this point.”

“No base infrastructure?” The Doctor yells the words, and slams his flat palms against the door. “Does that mean no base or no—anything at all?”

Rose’s eyes open wide. Reid gulps.

“I don’t know,” Ida answers honestly. “Once we get everything back up and running, we can offer you a suit to go outside—”

“Go outside? But where are we? What planet is this … place?” The Doctor turns around and demands in anger.

Ida shakes her head. “What _planet_? You mean … you really don’t know?”

Reid, Rose, and the Doctor exchange a look of concern.

“Show them.” Zach points to the covered up window in the room.

“If you say so,” Ida replies to Zach. Then, she turns to the newcomers. “But brace yourselves. The sight of it makes some people mad.”

She reaches over Zach’s computer and types in a sequence of access codes. A few moments later, the black covering of the window-like screen pulls back automatically, revealing a terrifying sight. Directly in front of them is a large, swirling orange cloud. Debris spirals around within it, and a black void throbs in its center.

“Is that a black hole?” The Doctor asks as more of a statement than a question, but his gaze doesn’t linger on the magnificent sight for long. Instead, he eyes Door 16 in anguish, as if trying to use x-ray vision to see through it in search for the Tardis.

Reid takes a step closer, narrows his eyes, then raises his thumb to his chin in thought. “I’d say it looks more like a helix nebula,” he begins.

Ida and The Doctor both look uncertain. Ida moves her mouth as if to interrupt him, but doesn’t have the words yet.

“Planetary nebulae are created at the end of a star’s evolution. From our point of view, it appears as though gases from the star have formed a coherent structure.” Reid points to the nebula behind the window and makes a swirling motion with his hand. “But the planetary nebula nucleus—the, uh, remnant of the previous star acting as the core—is destined to become a white dwarf, not a black hole.” Then, he chuckles a bit, as if making an inside joke to himself, “You know, depending on your perspective, some of these can actually be quite beautiful, like the famous Eye of God nebula … although it’s also called the Eye of Sauron by others. It doesn’t necessarily _have_ to drive you mad—”

“I thought you said _he_ was the doctor.” Ida makes eye contact with Rose, and points to Reid.

“We’re both doctors.” The Doctor crosses his arms and says with just a hint of bitterness. “But even though he’s technically right, something isn’t obeying the normal laws of physics here, I presume?”

Ida nods. “This lump of rock that this base is built on … you could almost call it a planet based on the way it’s acting, but it’s not one, really … it’s suspended in geostationary orbit around that nebula, black hole, whatever it is, perpetually. Without falling in.”

“And that’s bad, yeah?” Rose asks.

“It’s bad, but more than that, it really just doesn’t make sense,” Zach matches Ida’s thoughtful tone. “This planet’s generating a gravity field. We don’t know how. We’ve no idea. But it’s kept in constant balance against the black hole. And the field extends out there as a funnel. A distinct gravity funnel, reaching out into clear space. That was our way in. And because of that gravity field, the black hole’s not pulling us in. It’s taking all the matter around it. It’s crashing everything in this galaxy into its orbit, but not this little clump of rock—not us.”

“Nothing should be able to escape.” The Doctor shakes his head. “Light, gravity, time … and yet …”

“Here we are,” Reid finishes The Doctor’s sentence. He can’t take his eyes off the window, and they sparkle in amazement as the light reflects in his caramel colored irises.

As everyone else speaks, Toby wanders back to his desk and sits down, poring over his papers intently, but at the same time, looking like he’s about to pass out.

“He all right?” Rose nods her head toward Toby.

“Uh, maybe. Toby?” Zach calls over.

At the sound of the name, Reid’s attention is once again piqued. He darts his eyes over to Toby, who doesn’t reply verbally, but does meekly lift up his head from the work. He lifts up the corner of one of his papers as well, and it catches Reid’s attention.

“Oh!” Reid finally finds something exciting enough to take his focus away from the quasi black hole. He juts over toward Toby. “By archaeologist … she meant you’re the one working on the language in there?”

Toby nods.

“What is it? Where was it originally written, and why did you re-write that excerpt on the wall in the other room?” Reid asks eagerly.

Rose and The Doctor slowly follow Reid to Toby’s station, while Ida and Zach begin looking over something on Zach’s computer screen.

“In the scriptures of the Falltino, this planet is called Kroptor, the bitter pill.” Zach points to a photocopy of a very ancient manuscript page on his desk, which bears the same message we saw earlier, minus the _welcome to hell_ greeting. “And the black hole is supposed to be a mighty demon. It was tricked into devouring the planet, only to spit it out, because it was poison,” he recites the story mechanically.

Reid mulls over the possibility for a moment, then follows up in confusion: “Is that what the script says?”

“No. I’ve been working it for months, and nothing.” Toby sounds a bit sad—the first emotion he’s really expressed since they met him. “This planet used to be inhabited, back when the human race was in its infancy. Pictographs suggest the previous inhabitants buried something at this planet’s core, which is why we’re drilling.”

“Drilling?” The Doctor repeats.

Ida overhears the answer and replies from across the room. “Drilling, yeah. That gravity field Zach mentioned—to generate it, you’d need a power source with an inverted self extrapolating reflex of six to the power of six every six seconds. That ancient race seems to’ve found a way, though, and buried it 10 miles underground.”

“So, the drilling. That’s what you’re doing here. That’s why you risked everything to fly into this … black hole? Just to see what power source is down there?”

“Well, yeah,” Zach chimes in.

The Doctor laughs. “Humans! Brilliant, stupid, _beautiful_ humans. You came because it was there. But now … we need to find my Tardis and get out of here.”

“What?” Zach stands up from his chair and turns to face them. “I’m the captain here, and that’s out of the question.”

“Trust me,” The Doctor says with dead seriousness in his expression.

Ida shifts her weight to one leg and puts one hand on her hip. Zach looks ready for a fist fight. Toby stays in his chair, his head lolling to one side, as if he can’t stay awake.

“What, you don’t believe that something’s wrong here?” The Doctor furrows his brows. “Look at this place! You’re shutting down bits of your base one by one as they get shaken to the ground! There’s practically nothing left—”

“There used to be more crew here,” Reid interrupts the Doctor solemnly. Ida’s and Zach’s faces show that this is a controversial and emotional subject. “I mean, just look at the extra stations around the room. And Zach—you weren’t the original captain, were you? You’re trying to overexert your authority, while at the same time, you’re looking to Ida for seniority.” He profiles the situation easily.

Everything is quiet as they look at each other in uncomfortable silence.

Unexpectedly, one of the Ood interrupts.

“May I offer you a beverage?” It says through the orb in its hand.

“Um, no thanks—not if you’re a _slave_ being forced to give it to me,” Rose answers quickly, recalling the conversation from earlier.

“Oh, she’s one of that lot. Friends of the Ood and all.” Zach rolls his eyes. “The Ood are here to help with the drilling, and while they’re inside, with the serving, too. We treat them quite kindly: as you can see, we always bring them inside to be safe from the tremors. It’s the best thing for them to keep them constantly occupied. Without work, they simply wither away and die.”

Rose, surprised, raises an eyebrow to the Ood. “Really? Is that really what you want?”

“It is our pleasure—” The Ood begins through its orb in synthesized kindness. It lags for a moment though, and then, its voice drops a register and finishes ominously “—to serve man.”

Reid whips his head around: “serve man like _serve man_ , or serve man like the _Twilight Zone_ episode?”

No one gets the reference.

“You’re changing the subject—” The Doctor accuses Zach and Ida, not Rose. “We were talking about the rest of your crew, and you took the first opportunity to talk about something else.”

“They’re dead,” Zach replies bitterly. “Lost the captain coming in, and we’ve lost others in the drilling, and the disturbances we get from the black hole.”

“And it’s getting worse,” The Doctor hisses. “I can tell it’s getting worse. Listen to me. Let’s get out of here while there’s still time. We were called here. It must’ve been by you or your ship—you must know that teetering on the edge of this … dead star … isn’t safe anymore. You came, you saw, you saved yourselves before it was too late. Sound like a plan?”

The group exchanges a knowing look. The group, that is, except for Toby, who has disappeared silently from his desk.

“But how?” Zach asks. “When we came in, we knew there was no way out, unless we got to what was inside and harnessed its power—”

“Exactly. Reid—you stay in here with them and see what’s at the bottom when they finish drilling. Rose and I will go out looking for the Tardis. We go home, they go home, or we _bring_ them home if we have to. Everybody wins.”

“Got it,” Reid nods.

“One thing though—” Zach raises a finger. “You can’t just go out there whenever you like. We have to wait for the next break in the gravitational activity, so that nothing jostles you around when the planet moves. If you’re out during a tremor, you run the risk of flying right off the surface.”

“Fair enough,” The Doctor concedes with minimal appreciation of the severe risk Zach just explained. “When’s the next break?”

Ida looks at the computer on Zach’s desk. “Half an hour.”

************************************

The group prepares for their separate missions. Toby is back, and he stands with Reid in the corner going over the syllabic structure of the language, with a little more optimism at decoding it than he had before Reid arrived. The two discuss where various pictographs and pieces of the writing were found, both on and in the planet, and what the physical media and their locations might mean for a translation. A few of the Ood are also present to explain the progress of the drilling, which they say is on the verge of completion.

At the same time, Zach and Ida are pointing to two rust-colored spacesuits locked up safely in a wardrobe in the corner of the bridge. The outfits are tucked away behind clear glass, and come complete with fishbowl-style helmets just like in the movies.

“It’s all pretty standard,” The Doctor says. “We’ll be ready.”

“Are you sure?” Ida asks. “It’s a big risk, and it goes against every protocol—”

“And if you don’t bring these suits back,” Zach begins with a serious tone, “we’re screwed. They’re the only two we’ve got.”

“I’m sure we’re ready,” The Doctor acknowledges. “And I will bring them back. _We_ will. My Tardis is out there, and I’ve got to find h—er, it.” He ends the sentence a little more ambiguously to avoid questions.

“We’ll prepare the airlock.” Zach and Ida nod.

As they walk away, and exit through one of the other doors, Rose turns to The Doctor.

“How’d’you know that the Tardis is still out there?” She looks up at him with softness behind her triple-mascara-coated eyelashes. “That whole part of the base collapsed. The Tardis could’ve gone with it, and then—”

“She’s out there, Rose. I can feel it,” The Doctor says, almost too passionately.

“What, really?” Rose seems to sense that he’s not quite serious.

“Well—” The Doctor begins in his typical way and tilts his head one way, then the other. “A little. But mostly, I can tell she’s out there because she _has_ to be. We can’t lose the Tardis. She’s the last one left, and with my planet gone, losing her means we’d be stuck.” He accentuates the last “k” sound with a click of his tongue, and the sound echoes through the room for a moment.

“Stuck _here_? Forever?” Rose asks, and as the words come out, they melt into the air weakly, like the thought of them makes them unsayable.

“No, not here, anyway. We could at least hitch a ride with the crew to avoid that.”

“So, we’d get out of here, and then what?” Rose begins seriously, but then continues, “…Find a planet, get a job, live a life, same as the rest of the universe?” She holds The Doctor’s gaze for a moment as her playful turn lightens the mood. Slowly, they both begin to smile. Then, they begin to chuckle, and in a moment, they’re full-out laughing.

“Do you really want that?” The Doctor asks as he gasps for breath. “Just to live a stationary, _normal_ life?”

“No, not at all! Do you?”

“No!” They continue laughing.

As her laughter subsides, Rose says thoughtfully, “So, that’s it. That’s why the Tardis is out there.”

“Exactly.” The Doctor puts his hand on Rose’s shoulder and looks at her with determination. “We find her so we can go on living the way we want to—or at least—if we want—the same—I mean—” The Doctor gets more and more awkward as he struggles to ask her a question. “Well, what kind of life do you want? In all seriousness?”

“I’d’nt’know,” Rose bites her lip. She looks up to The Doctor, and he leans his head down to her. “I want to … keep seeing the universe … but more than that, keep helping people … y’know.”

“Yeah?” His voice drops to a whisper.

“Yes.”

“And, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if—” Rose continues shyly.

Out of nowhere, the sound of a cell phone interrupts them. Rose and The Doctor snap out of their intense focus on each other.

“That’s mine!” Rose reaches into her heavily embroidered back pocket, completely alarmed. She holds out her phone—a small flip phone with a black stripe—between them. They both look at it, but the Caller ID on the digital screen is just a string of numbers.

“D’you know who’s calling?” The Doctor asks.

Unbeknownst to Rose and The Doctor, all the Ood in the room silently grab the sides of their heads with their left hands, as if they’re getting some kind of horrible headache. The little spheres that they hold begin to glow red.

“No, I don’t know who it is. Should I answer it?” Rose is flummoxed.

Across the room, Reid notices what’s happening with the Ood, and looks over to Rose and The Doctor. When they don’t meet his gaze, he shoots his eyes quickly to Toby for an explanation, only to see the archaeologist acting very strangely. Toby, covering both of his ears with his hands, rises from his seat and runs forward a few steps, only to stop and run backwards a few more, leaving him right where he started. He repeats this bizarre dance a second time: forward, then backward. Finally, he staggers sideways and runs, wobbling, toward one of the doors along the side of the room.

“Open Door 21: Personal Quarters,” the computer voice says as Toby passes through.

Reid takes one step after Toby, then pauses. He recites something very rapidly and without expression, as if simply recalling the words: “ _What the deuce is the matter with the dog ... they surely would not take a cab, or go off in a balloon._ ” A look of panic strikes his face. “It can’t be—”

Rather than following Toby, Reid rushes over to Rose and The Doctor, who continue to argue about the phone call. “Yes, answer it! I mean, this far away from earth—it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to—” The Doctor stammers.

Rose looks down at the screen, and, realizing that the phone is on its last ring, shakily lifts it to her ear. “Hello?” she answers.

We pan in close to Rose’s face as she suddenly goes from worried to confused, and lifts her eyes to meet Reid’s.

“Er, yes, hold on a moment.” Rose offers the phone to Reid, who has one eyebrow raised with concern, as if mentally begging Rose not to say what she’s going to next. “It’s for you.”

Reid takes the phone and gulps. “Hello?” He affects an overly happy tone.

“H-hi, Spencer.” The voice on the phone _is_ Maeve’s this time. “It’s me.”

“Hi …” Reid seems to forget that he’s already answered, so he greets her again, this time with far too much concern. Realizing his mistake, he attempts to correct it, but merely repeats his initial flub: “Hi!” he exclaims.

“Lots of greetings today,” The Doctor jokes under his breath. He and Rose watch Reid, as The Doctor offers fun-spirited impressions of the day’s events in a high-pitched voice: “Oh, hello! HELL. Hello? Hi? Hi!”

Reid glowers at him, and The Doctor recognizes that he’s missing something, but tilts his head as if to ask what. As he does so, he sees what the Ood are doing, and instinctively grabs Rose’s arm.

Though the Ood’s orbs no longer grow red, the aliens continue to hold one hand over the sides of their faces, almost like a person plugging their ears. Then, they start running in the same strange way that Toby did: forward, then back, forward, then back, then darting around in a circle. Rose, Reid, and The Doctor can’t look away as the aliens continue this strange scene.

“Maeve,” Reid shifts his weight around nervously, and holds the small flip phone with both hands. We follow in a close-shot to his well chiseled face, and come in close enough to hear both sides of his phone call. “You called … how’d you get this number?”

“What do you mean?” Maeve sounds very serious. “You justcalled me. At least, I figured it was you, because I saw the number came through a pay phone. But the call dropped, so I hit redial.”

Listening to Reid carefully and intuiting the rest of the conversation, Rose looks at The Doctor. “My phone’s the default hookup to the Tardis?” She brings her hands to her heart, as if deeply complimented. “Am I on your speed dial?”

“Well, more like the, er, the Tardis’s … ‘in case of emergency,’ contact,” The Doctor says, and shoves his hands into his suit pockets bashfully. This pulls his suit jacket forward and gives us, as we pan around the scene, an excellent view of his ass.

We suddenly jump back to Reid’s conversation, which is much more serious. “I _just_ called?” He says the words loudly to be sure Rose and The Doctor can hear him. “Right now? Not earlier today? Not five minutes ago?”

“Y-yes. Like I said, I-I just dialed you back. What’s going on? Is something wrong?” Maeve sounds deeply concerned.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” Reid lies as he watches the struggling Ood. In perfect timing, Zach and Ida emerge from the chamber they entered earlier, and are immediately struck by the strange-acting Ood as well.

“Oh my God!” Ida shouts.

“What’s wrong with them?” Zach demands.

In response, Reid cups his hand over the phone to try to hide the background noise, and paces off to a corner of the room. Adding yet more noise to the mix, a quiet alarm chirps a few times at Zach’s computer station. This shifts our perspective back to the others, leaving Reid in the background and his conversation out of earshot for a moment.

“Tremors dissipating,” the computerized female voice reads over the intercom. “Quiet period now available. Next quiet period will appear in solar earth measurements … two years, three months, fourteen days, eleven hours, and four minutes.”

Everybody looks to each other in panic, all at once, and a very deep, low-pitched vibration passes through the base.

“Two years?” The Doctor shouts. Rose looks around the room for some kind of clue, hyper-focusing on the alarmed-looking Ood.

“I don’t like this!” Zach growls. Ida rushes over to the computer.

“Something’s changed. Something huge has completely and instantly altered the orbit and force of the—” Ida begins explaining. “Reid! Any idea why—” she shouts to Reid, her voice expressing desperation to hear his answer. Reid, however, clasps his hand even tighter over the phone, and focuses more intently on the call.

“Does it matter _why_ it’s happening?” The Doctor demands. “Because unless your sensors are wrong, we’ve got to get out there right now, otherwise we can’t look for the Tardis for two years!” He instinctively grabs Rose’s hand, and, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, she reaches for his, too. Knowing exactly what they both intend to do, Rose and The Doctor run, hand in hand, to the cabinet where the spacesuits are safely stored. Zach and Ida follow.

“Maeve—” Reid says her name pleadingly as everything in the room becomes utter chaos.

“Drilling complete,” the female computer voice suddenly adds.

“The pit is open. The pit is open.” The orbs of the Ood glow as if they’re filled with flames, the same way the Tardis console did when Reid initially tried to call Maeve.

“Did I do something wrong? What’s going on over there?” Maeve asks frantically.

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong at all,” Reid says with such kindness and tenderness that he reaches out to the air, as if to lightly tuck his fingers under a woman’s chin. But no one is there. “Look, I have to go. It’s just this case.”

“Then why’d you call?” Maeve’s voice is passionate.

A different kind of alarm starts up. This one is loud and constant, blaring both through Zach’s computer and the entire intercom.

“I can’t explain now,” Reid’s voice shakes. “But I love you.”

He hangs up the phone without lingering another moment. The moment that he does, all the Ood in the room fall to the floor in unconscious heaps.

In the time that we were focused on Maeve and Reid’s conversation, Zach and Ida have been focused on helping The Doctor and Rose put on the rust-colored spacesuits. They stand huddled around the wardrobe in the corner of the room. The Doctor looks ready to go, but Rose is virtually swimming in her suit.

“It won’t fit,” Ida says as she tugs at one of the sleeves. The suit makes an ASMR-inducing crinkly sound, but is just clearly too long for Rose’s arms.

“What’d’you mean, it doesn’t … self-adjust or something?” Rose asks.

“No. I should’ve thought of this! The suits are made a specific size, these both for our taller officers—may they rest in peace,” Ida explains.

Zach interjects. “You.” He points to Reid. “How tall are you?”

“Uh, six-one?” Reid replies, his voice a thin sliver among the other noises in the room.

“All right, then, you’re going.” Zach’s voice is grave and low.

“I’m what?”

“It works better this way anyway,” The Doctor looks at Reid seriously. “You go down the drilling shaft, I go after what’s left of Storage Six. You get the base its power source, I get us our Tardis.”

“Me?” Reid yelps. “But what about—” He looks to Rose.

“It has to be you!” The Doctor says demandingly, but then takes some of the strain out of his voice in order to encourage Reid. “Don’t worry. You’re very good, doctor,” The Doctor half-smiles and whips his head as he lays out the compliment. “You know the math, you know the science. You’ll be just as good as me down there.”

With Ida’s help, Rose steps out of the spacesuit’s leg holes. As soon as the suit is off of Rose, Ida immediately holds one leg open for Reid, and Zach grabs the other side to help him get into it. The crew members effortlessly pull it all the way up, and begin securing it in place. In a matter of seconds, both The Doctor and Reid are fully suited up, except for their helmets. The Doctor holds his helmet in his hand, and Ida hands Reid his.

“Through here,” Zach instructs them. The group heads back into the bridge room, and then approaches one of the doors along the back wall.

“Opening Door 19,” The computerized voice reads. They pass through the door, and enter a narrow hallway. At the end of the hallway is a giant window looking out over the pale gray, moon-like surface of the planet, and the vast expanse of space all around it.

Reid looks mesmerized by the majesty of the cosmos.

“Here you are,” Zach says. “Put those helmets on, and as soon as the three of us get out of here—” he points to Ida, Rose, and himself “—Ida’ll decompress the room, and you can go out. I’ll start setting up. And Ida—”

Ida nods, and picks up Zach’s instructions from there. “Doctor—the remains of Storage Six will be directly behind you when you step out. Reid—The pit is to our right, just about 50 meters. You can’t miss it. The Ood have been using a manually-operated elevator down the shaft. Just step in and press up or down—”

As Ida continues speaking to Reid, The Doctor raises his helmet above his head to put it on. Rose reaches up to help him, and their eyes meet. In only an instant, The Doctor stops putting on his helmet and instead throws it onto the ground. As he lowers his hands, Rose throws her arms over his shoulders and kisses him. He immediately reciprocates, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her tightly into him. She holds the nape of his neck and starts combing her fingers into his hair, pulling his face even closer as if she’s waited forever for this moment.

They pull away, but still hold each other close.

“If you’re going without me, you’d better come back,” Rose demands in a shaky whisper.

Over the intercom, Zach clears his throat.

Rose and The Doctor ignore it. The Doctor takes Rose’s face in his spacesuit-gloved hands and gives her one last, lingering, parting kiss.

As if mocking the other two, Ida knocks on the front of Reid’s helmet like it’s a door. “And you come back, too, now.”

“Airlock’s ready to send you out.” Zach’s voice sounds a bit crackly and synthesized over the speaker.

Ida rolls her eyes, and in one swift movement, sweeps The Doctor’s helmet off the ground and places it between him and Rose. Then, Ida puts her arm around Rose’s shoulder, and pulls her gently away. Rose leaves willingly enough, but glances back at The Doctor last time.

“I’ll see you soon,” Rose says.

“You can count on it.” The Doctor agrees.

Rose and Ida leave the airlock, and get behind the controls with Zach. Ida begins the decompression process just as The Doctor finishes securing his helmet.

Inside the small, narrow room, Reid and The Doctor look to each other.

“Told you you guys love each other,” Reid jokes playfully.

“I didn’t deny it,” The Doctor chuckles and shakes his head. Then he gets serious. “But I still stand by what I said before.”

“That it’s too dangerous?”

“That _your_ girlfriend’s the reason we’re all wrapped us up in this. I know you saw that all this went to chaos when she called—”

“Air pressure deactivated in three, two, one …” The computer voice reads, and a rush of smoke fills the room. The window that leads outside the base begins to open straight out, like a ramp, revealing open space in front of The Doctor and Reid leading down to the dusty gray surface of the planet.

Slowly, silently, they walk down the ramp and investigate their surroundings. First, as The Doctor turns around, we pan around cinematically, and follow his gaze as he looks at the spot where the rest of the base used to be. Instead of rubble or remnants, there’s simply a long, wide crevasse in the ground.

We pan back around toward Reid, who turns to his right and walks toward a large hole in the ground—it’s at least 50 feet in diameter, and unfathomably deep. As he examines it, though, we see that there’s also a long, skinny crevasse here, extending out of the circle. Now, we pan between The Doctor’s and Reid’s points of view as they both follow the crack, and ultimately see that the crevasse is one and the same.

The Doctor presses a button on his helmet to communicate with Reid. “It’s all gone underground,” he says grimly.

“The pit is open,” Reid repeats, and swallows hard. “So …”

The Doctor turns back to Reid, and together, they walk toward the pit. As they approach, we see that the elevator down into the pit is on the complete opposite side of the hole as the crevasse, and thus, it appears to be in perfectly fine condition.

“So we go down. Both of us.” The Doctor points toward the contraption, and they approach it together.

************************************

Five minutes later, both orange-clad spacemen stand in an open-air metal basket that resembles a New York window washer’s platform more than a real elevator. The Doctor keeps his finger on the down arrow, so that the apparatus mechanically lowers them down the hole. It’s completely dark, except for the head lamps that shine out through the visors of their space helmets.

“We’re just a few meters away, now.” The Doctor looks down over the edge. The elevator screeches to a halt, right above the gray, sandy ground of the pit.

A few feet away, however, the ground is made of something else entirely. There is a large, round metal circle covering the floor of the pit like a rug. It is silver and shiny, and covered in intricate pictures, almost like a Tibetan mandala.

The Doctor and Reid both step as close to it as they can without standing on it. Even from behind his helmet visor, we can see Reid’s eyes moving quickly over the engravings on the circle, as if he’s deciphering them.

“This is not a place of honor.” Reid whispers.

“You can decode … that?” The Doctor asks, and points to the pictures. “But it looks even more insane than the regular writing!”

“The two systems are obviously related.”

“Well, obviously,” The Doctor says sarcastically.

Reid continues: “This one values the same jagged and pointed aesthetic as the other.” Reid points to a few choice symbols. “But the images are pictographic, not logographic.”

“Meaning?”

“It isn’t a word or group of words. It’s a picture that sends the message. I don’t actually know what _this_ message says, but it looks a lot like the message that a group of American scholars attempted to share with future societies in the early 1990s.”

“What, _earth_ in the 1990s?” The Doctor asks. “What were they trying to communicate, and with whom? And why would their message be something like ‘this is not a place of honor’?” The Doctor demands all at once, and pokes fun at the cryptic sentence.

“Not if the people who would come across it 10,000 years in the future could no longer read the language …” Reid gets a faraway look in his expression as he seems to deeply connect this strange circle on the ground with the example he’s recalling from earth. This leads him to recite more of the 1990s message in reverent tones: “The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”

“Your made-up picture language from _earth_ in the 1990s really says that?” The Doctor raises an eyebrow.

“Not exactly. Remember, it represents the message without saying it. That’s the whole point.”

“I’ll take your word for it, linguist.” The Doctor accentuates the last syllable with mirth in his voice. “So, what does that mean for us, then?”

“It means we need to get out of here, and leave this circle thing alone, because for all we know, there’s something radioactive in there.” Reid nods, and points to the center of the seal, where the engraving looks like a large upside-down triangle with two horns sticking out of the top, and a mouth-like oval at the bottom.

“Radioactive waste?” The Doctor grabs his stomach and laughs. “That’s it? Radioactive waste? These spacesuits will easily protect us from radioactivity.”

Reid furrows his brow. “Really?”

“Yes. And if that’s what’s buried under this thing … or, I’d guess, some kind of nuclear power, well, let’s just say, the Tardis will also be fine, and it’ll be quite easy for the base to harness nuclear energy, take flight, and get out of here.”

The Doctor claps his hands, as he often does. Even though the spacesuit allows his fingers to be separate in thick black gloves, the clapping motion doesn’t make the normal sound— instead, there’s just a bit of bunching and crunching. He fearlessly takes a few steps toward the center of the metal circle, and then crouches down.

“I’m assuming it’ll open, if you just …” The Doctor puts his hand at the top of the upside-down triangle, and then gently repositions his gloved fingers as if trying to find the trick brick that opens a secret passage.

“You’re supposed to use your fingers?” Reid asks, and tucks his own gloved hand under his chin.

“Standard procedure, yeah.” The Doctor sticks out his tongue ever so slightly in thought as he continues trying various hand positions.

Reid, seized with an idea, now takes his hand out from under his chin and begins to twiddle his fingers, as if signing various letters in ASL. For a moment, he lands on the surfer’s “hang loose” symbol, with his three middle fingers down and his thumb and pinky up, but then, he closes one eye and compares it to the engravings The Doctor is working with.

“Uh oh …” Reid murmurs. Changing only one finger, he repositions his hand so that his index finger and pinky are up, and his ring and middle finger are down with his thumb holding them in place.

The Doctor remains crouched on the ground, but looks back over his shoulder with seriousness in his brilliant brown eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Any chance that … whoever used to live here believed in the Devil?” Reid sounds almost like he’s joking.

“Well—” The Doctor removes his hand from the seal and pulls his head back to get a closer look. Then, he slowly stands up. He takes a few steps back toward Reid, getting more and more serious as he takes in the signs.

“That’s it! These are … representations of the Horned Beast from all across the universe. He turns up in the myths and legends of a million worlds. Earth, Draconia, Velconsadine, Daemos. The Kaled god of war. It’s the same image, over and over again.”

“The image of the beast.” Reid points at the center of the circle. “That’s what it wants. A demon face with two horns.” He holds the devil hand sign up to The Doctor.

The Doctor nods toward the circle. “Go on, then. Try it.”

Reid shakily walks to the center and lowers his devil fingers onto the top of the triangle.

Immediately, the whole shiny metal seal shakes and shifts. It reveals that it’s actually divided into four slices that instantly open downwards into a dark pit below. The movement is so quick that Reid falls right inside before he or The Doctor can do anything.

“Reid!” The Doctor shouts, and jumps in after him.

As The Doctor disappears, blindingly bright red light shines out from the pit like a spotlight.

************************************

On the moon base, Rose, Ida, and Zach stare anxiously out the window. When they see the bright red flash of light, all three squint and shield their eyes.

Suddenly, Zach’s computer begins chirping.

“Massive energy source detected,” the computerized female voice says.

“He’s done it!” Ida declares. She rushes over to the computer in disbelief. “Without even having to hook up our base—Reid’s released some massive energy source with the potential power to launch us straight out of the black hole!”

“All right, then. Everyone, prepare the emergency craft. The second they get back here, we’re taking off.” Zach orders.

“Sounds good, but, er … where’s Toby?” Rose asks.

On cue, Toby emerges from one of the doors. His face is downcast, and all his skin is pale. “The pit is open,” he repeats.

“Yeah, the Ood told us that.” Ida scoffs, and points to the lumps of motionless Ood on the floor. “

Rose has a different reaction. “You all right, mate?” She tries to sound sweet, but there’s a sliver of suspicion in her voice.

Toby lifts up his head and meets their eyes. His are bloodshot and red, like he hasn’t slept for years. “The pit is open!” he cries. And then, his pink eyes bulging, he looks at Rose without blinking: “And you will die in battle.”

Rose jumps a foot in the air, but not because of Toby’s terrifying tidings. She reaches into her back pocket once again. The phone is simply spazzing out like crazy, vibrating and ringing incessantly, though Maeve’s number is listed on the caller ID.

“What do you—” Rose looks up at Toby and tries to sound demanding, but her voice falters.

“Not just you. So will _she_.” He points a bony finger toward the phone.

************************************

Inside the pit, Reid crash-lands onto a pile of crashy things, just a dozen or so feet beneath the seal. He lays on his back and groans, but is otherwise fine, until …

The Doctor leaps down, but doesn’t see that he’s falling straight for Reid until after he’s jumped. He reaches out to brace himself like a cat, which makes him land straddling Reid with both his arms and legs. The impact, though, is too much; he can’t support himself, and he flops right onto Reid anyway—in the most precarious of positions.

Both make low grunting sounds and close their eyes in pain, but neither move for a minute. It takes a moment to recover from the impact. Once they do, they both open their eyes at the same time, only to find that they’re staring right at each other … or they would be, if they could see past the blazing bright headlamps of each other’s helmets. They both squint blindly for a moment before realizing what’s going on.

The Doctor quickly barrel rolls off Reid and twirls himself up to his feet, then offers his hand to help Reid up nonchalantly.

Reid sits up. He grabs the back of his head with the left hand, and takes The Doctor’s glove with the right. As soon as he stands, both men look around the room anxiously.

They’re in another cave directly beneath the first one. It’s round, except that just like we saw aboveground, one long curving crack—at the bottom of the pit, it’s just wide enough for a person to walk through—also extends out to one side, like a tunnel leading away from the main room. Within the area that we can see, the cave walls are covered in messages written in both of the languages that Reid and Toby worked on. But one system of images, in particular, is bigger than all the rest. It is a large circle, with a smaller circle inside it. The border of the larger circle is surrounded by arrows, and the inside of the smaller circle has the same upside-down triangle with horns that responded to the devil sign that Reid made.

“ _I have thought it my duty to my fellow-men to place on record these forewarnings of The Coming Race_ …” Reid murmurs, and steps toward the engraving.

“More of your message from the 1990s?”

“No. This time it’s actually the 1870s,” Reid answers in a confused tone. His eyes follow the engraving up the wall, and then, all the way up to the chasm above them. Then, he turns around and looks at The Doctor.

The Doctor steps toward him. “What’s all this you’re always on about?” The Doctor asks, but right as he finishes his question, the sound of broken ceramic beneath his feet echoes through the cave. The Doctor and Reid both look down, where they see the remains of what might have once been a deep-red amphora-shaped vessel. A few feet away, we also see for the first time that there is some kind of stalagmite with a metal platform stuck on its top, serving as a pedestal to present the amphora.

“Did I do that?” The Doctor looks down at it. However, the pile of shards is so large, and the pedestal is so close by, that it’s clear the vase simply fell off of its stand.

“No, it must’ve been—” Reid begins, but stops immediately. “Oh no.”

“Oh no, what?”

“It’s escaped! And it’s gone back to the upper world …”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Devil!” Reid sounds completely frantic.

“But that’s just what I was saying …” The Doctor argues. “Whatever you want to believe about religion, in the end, the Devil is just an idea. No matter how many civilizations make up the same idea, it’s just—”

“Don’t you see?” Reid asks. “That’s exactly it. It’s an idea, made up … made up _here_ for the first time, in order to stop people from going looking underground, because the energy source trapped in the,” he points to the broken pot, “amphora is too strong …”

“So strong that it takes on a life, a voice of its own, and if you get too close, it bleeds through …” The Doctor follows him.

“It has to take on a life of its own … because the most certain way to ensure that people who can’t read the symbols don’t dig it up, is to create a synthetic oral tradition … a myth purposefully made, almost _physically_ made … to flow through the veins of anyone who hears it … and if someone studies it for a long enough period of time, or comes in contact with it frequently enough … they would be prone to give its life a new vessel …” Reid cuts himself short. “That’s Toby! That’s the Ood! And the energy—”

“We have to get back to the others!” The Doctor shouts.

************************************

Immediately after speaking, Toby falls to the ground just like the Ood did earlier.

“I’m going to die in battle? And Maeve, too?” Rose looks down at Toby’s unconscious bod and demands. “Well, not if I have anything to say about it.” She puts a hand on her hip.

“I’m sorry, but what just happened to Toby?” Zach demands.

“I don’t know. But it looks like energy wasn’t the only thing they released from the pit.” Ida says shakily.

“Don’t you see?” Rose asks. “The energy in that pit … it isn’t safe. It isn’t good. It’s evil, it’s got to be—”

She is interrupted when an alarm blares again, and this is the loudest and most urgent one yet. It continues blaring like a fire alarm, and in between wails, the computerized female voice shares a new message. “Structural integrity endangered. Evacuate base immediately. Structural integrity endangered. Evacuate base immediately.”

“When Toby wrote _Welcome to Hell_ …” Rose speculates, but is drowned out by the rest of the disorder on the ship.

“Structural integrity?” Ida shouts over Rose. “We’d’ve felt one hell of a tremor if it the base’s integrity was compromised. Computer! Structural integrity of what?”

“Structural integrity of planet endangered. Interior collapsing.”

Rose gasps, and staggers backward from the window as if she’s just been shot. “No! It can’t’ve?” she gasps.

“All right, executive decision. As acting captain, I say we get out of here right now.” Zach puts his hand on Rose’s shoulder, trying to quiet her.

“What? No! Toby … or that thing, whatever energy is coming out … said _I_ would die in battle, not The Doctor. Or Reid!” Rose objects.

“I’m sorry, Rose,” Ida says soothingly. “If the power source is that strong that it’s causing the planet to collapse, and it’s emanating from where he was …”

“No!” Rose shakes her shoulders, throwing both Ida and Zach off of her. “You can’t seriously say that we’re going to use that—” she gestures toward the devilish light they can see out the window. “We can’t use _that_ to get out of here, and leave The Doctor, who’s working on a much safer way!”

“I said _executive decision_ ,” Zach nods to Ida, exchanging some kind of secret message. Then, Zach bends down and picks up Toby easily in a fireman’s carry. “We’re all getting to the emergency craft right now.”

************************************

Reid frantically clutches at the wall of the cave, as if to see if it’s possible to climb back up to the room above. We follow his eyes as he looks high above him, and sees the bright red beam of light bursting upward, hovering above this smaller cave as it shines into space. Almost as if the energy has a mind of its own, it avoids going back toward the amphora it was once trapped in.

“We have to warn them!” Reid shouts. “The energy source is too strong! If they try to harness it for flight, their engines will _explode_ , and the entire planet …”

“Rose will warn them! We’ve got to transfer the energy!” The Doctor disagrees.

“What do you mean?” Reid demands. “If she’s back at the base, how can she possibly know that trying to use the energy will cause the entire planet to explode in such an unthinkable way that it—”

“Forms the remnants of a semi helix nebula, semi black hole, like the one we’re currently bordering on?” The Doctor is completely earnest. “She won’t know that, but she’ll _know._ Believe me.”

“OK, fine. Even if Rose can stop the people back at the base from killing us all, how do we relocate the energy without recreating the _same_ black hole we’re already fighting against? See, that’s the thing. You said a black hole _like_ ours, but really, the reason the nebula-slash-black-hole is so irregular is because it’s constantly being recreated in an infinite loop …”

“You, with all your proper American science degrees, actually came to the conclusion that this had something to do with cyclical time?” The Doctor seems shocked.

“We’re already talking about an impossible planet. It may be improbable, but almost like we’re living out a true nineteenth-century hollow earth narrative, it’s the only remaining way to resolve the problem.” Reid rambles for a minute before explaining. “Philosophically speaking, _the true picture of the past whizzes by … To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize how it really was_ … because it never statically was, or is.”

“Very good. Now, allons-y! We’ve got to take control of a memory as it flashes in a moment of danger!” The Doctor puts a slight skip in his step before darting in the direction of the long crack.

Reid follows him. “You really think the Tardis is through there?” Reid calls after The Doctor.

“Remember!” The Doctor holds up one finger. “She has to be!”

Reid narrows his eyes in thought for a moment, realizing that The Doctor implies more than his words simply say. It clicks for him right as the Doctor enters the crevasse.

Reid follows him, the light from his helmet just barely illuminating far enough ahead for him to watch The Doctor’s back. Luckily, the ground is pretty much the same smooth surface as the floor of the cave, and both men are skinny enough to trot through the crack with relative ease.

After a moment, however, Reid realizes the full extent of the conversation they just shared.

“Hey,” Reid calls after The Doctor again. “You didn’t recognize _The Coming Race_ , but you can quote back _Theses on the Philosophy of History_?”

“Hmm?” The Doctor asks, careful not to turn around as he maneuvers the narrow space. “Oh, is that what that’s called?” he laughs and continues running. “It was just part of a manuscript I picked up in a briefcase around … oh, 1940, I think? Fascinating stuff. Real forward-thinker, that one. Well, and by forward-thinker, I mean, they had the whole _timey wimey_ thing down way … _outside_ of their time, to be more accurate. Saw things differently than everyone else in your world.”

“ _You_ took Benjamin’s lost briefcase?” Reid is hyperventilating now, both out of excitement and exhaustion.

“Well, _took_ is a bit strong. I swapped that briefcase for one of the Tardis’s by accident in the hotel that day, and there wasn’t a name—” At that moment, The Doctor is cut off by the sight that looms ahead of them.

************************************

Zach, Ida, and Rose gather in front of the door to the emergency craft. Toby, still unconscious, is already strapped inside.

“We’re all ready to go,” Zach says. “We’ve got precious little time left before the base collapses, and the whole planet goes, taking the new energy source with it.

“I’m not going!” Rose shouts, as Zach comes toward her with his hands outstretched, as if to lead her away. “It isn’t safe for anyone! We need to wait here for The Doctor!”

“There’s no way of knowing if he’s coming back! If he makes it out alive, great, but why risk waiting?”

“What’d’you mean, why?” Rose yells. “Because. Because he’d wait for me! And he wouldn’t want _you_ to get yourselves killed!”

Ida approaches Rose from behind, and slips a long syringe into her shoulder. Rose instantly passes out, and Ida and Zach carry her into the emergency ship.

************************************

Reid and The Doctor stand at the mouth of the long crevasse. It opens up into a long, skinny rectangular space, reminiscent of the original shape of the base. However, the crack in the ground seems to have opened up in such a way that it created a massive rubble heap of industrial garbage destroyed metal in the shape of a ramp towering sky-high. This ramp begins right in front of Reid and The Doctor, and at the top of its mountain, dirty but unharmed, is the Tardis.

“ _Not merely as the Redeemer, he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ_ ,” Reid finishes quoting some philosophical lines, only to himself. Then, with a huge grin, he says a bit louder: “Or maybe the vanquisher is a _She_.”

“What’s that?” The Doctor asks.

“Just admiring your Tardis.”

They run up the ramp.

************************************

Zach, Ida, Rose, and Toby are all strapped into the emergency craft preparing for flight. Toby and Rose sit in the back two seats, both unconscious, while Zach and Ida sit in the pilot and co-pilot seats. They look out over the collapsing planet and sky of stars through the windshield-like front of the spaceship.

Rose comes to, strapped not only into her seat but with her hands tied behind her back. She struggles fiercely.

 “Connection established. Power by alternative energy will blast us off in 10 seconds.” Zach shifts the small ship into gear.

“Good. Funnel active and ready for entry.” Ida pushes a button on her computer. “Computer, count us down.”

The computerized female voice responds steadily: “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 …”

“No, we can’t!” Rose shouts. With that, Rose finally gets her hands free and clicks off her seatbelt in one deft motion.  

“3, 2, …”

Rose rushes around the back row and comes around behind Zach’s seat like a high jumper making her approach. Before anyone can stop her from coming, Rose leaps in front of Zach’s arms and grabs them, which stops him from pushing the button that will initiate the ship’s use of the energy. At that moment, the blinding red light whizzes toward them, but in an instant, is overwhelmed by a bright blue light instead.

“WHAT DID YOU DO?” Zach demands, and throws Rose off of him. She stumbles awkwardly away, and, with nowhere else to go in the small emergency escape craft, returns to her original seat.

“Nothing. I’ve just been sitting here.” She smiles knowingly, and, for a joke, positions her seatbelt without actually clipping it back on, then pins her hands back behind the chair.

A bit delayed, the lights and instruments inside the spacecraft flicker twice as the ship short-circuits. Afterwards, everything goes pitch black. The floor shakes, as if the emergency craft is unexpectedly moving against its will.

“We pulled all the remaining energy up with that connection!” Ida shouts into the dark. “Now that we didn’t use it, we’re going to be trapped here forever!”

Quite far in front of them, a single light turns on. It’s the bright blue-white light of the Tardis console; instead of looking through the windshield to oversee the planet or outer space, we look out onto the Tardis interior. The Doctor and Reid are still wearing their spacesuits, but have taken their helmets off. They stand in front of the console, back-lit and in perfect silhouette mirror image of each other. They each have their arms folded, and one foot crossed over the other.

“What in God’s name—” Zach murmurs.

“Hello!” The Doctor waves to them.

“Doctor!” Rose shouts, and tears begin to fill her eyes. “It’s bad, right! Tell me we weren’t supposed to use the energy, because it’s from hell or something.”

Rose’s voice is so loud that it causes Zach and Ida to turn around in alarm. She simply looks at them matter-of-factly, and, still pretending that she can’t move her arms, nods to the Tardis with her chin. “Oh, that? It’s bigger on the inside.”

Ida whips back around toward The Doctor and Reid. “What did you do? We were going to be fine!” she demands. “And now, if you’ve destroyed the energy source, we don’t have the force to pull out of the field of the black hole—”

“ _Au contraire_ ,” The Doctor disagrees. “Rose is right. Nothing good could’ve come from that energy source.”

“The sheer power it generated would’ve caused an explosion and created the black hole if we didn’t contain it,” Reid speaks quickly, as usual.

“You mean another black hole, beside what was already there?” Zach asks.

“No, the one that was there. But now that we neutralized the energy by taking it all up in the exact moment, and displacing it into a different relative dimension,” The Doctor begins …

“The black-hole-like, fallen-slash-impossible planet is just an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases,” Reid finishes.

Things are very quiet for a moment.

“You turned a black hole back into a stellar nebula?” Ida finally breaks the silence.

“Well, really just reset it a little.” The Doctor wiggles his fingers within his glove. “It happens more often than you think.”

“You sound like you did … way back when we picked up that briefcase in Port-Bou!” Rose accuses The Doctor playfully, trying in vain to hide how happy she is to see him once again. There’s a glimmer of recognition in her eyes as they connect over old times. “This’s got something to do with eternal return, yeah?”

The Doctor smiles proudly, but Reid literally facepalms. “Seriously, guys, do you have any idea what that briefcase means to media theorists—”

The Doctor doesn’t stay to listen to Reid’s complaint. Instead, the moment Rose finishes speaking, he rushes toward the exit craft. We hear a few sonic screwdriver noises at the door that the crew used to enter, and then, The Doctor bursts in.

As the door flies open, Zach and Ida cover their faces with their arms, as if they still expect to get sucked into space. Not to worry, of course. The entire spaceship is still, indeed, inside the Tardis.

The Doctor runs toward Rose and kneels down in front of her seat. He reaches around her, as if to untie her hands, but at the exact moment he realizes they aren’t bound, she throws her arms around him.

“Already got ‘em,” she bites her lip, then smiles.

The Doctor smiles, too, and lifts her up out of her seat as she embraces him. “I knew it!” he says, and they hold each other tightly for several seconds. “In all this world—these worlds—of heavens and hells and devils and demons and semi gods and demi gods and everything … I can always believe in you.”

Rose buries her face in the squishy padding of The Doctor’s spacesuit for a moment, and then pulls away.

“And that whole time, I never stopped believing in you.”

When they pull away from each other, The Doctor keeps Rose in his arms for just a moment. They lock eyes with each other for only an instant, but then slowly close their lids as they lean into each other for a warm and tender kiss.

Everything in both spaceships is silent for the moment.

The Doctor and Rose pull away, and The Doctor sets Rose down on the ground, but keeps one of her hands in his.

“We’ll, er, just go back in there, then.” The Doctor points to the Tardis interior across the way, and then looks to Ida, Zach, and Toby. “We’ll drop you off on your home planet, and be on our way.”

************************************

As Reid watches this unfold from inside the Tardis, he is moved to the point of tears. When Rose and The Doctor emerge from inside the exit craft, he averts his eyes and covers his face with his hands, but The Doctor and Rose have already noticed. They stop walking toward the console.

Still hand in hand, Rose uses The Doctor’s grip to balance herself as she goes on tiptoe to whisper into The Doctor’s ear: “I’ll talk to him. You take that lot back home.”

Reid, seeing Rose approach him, tries to walk off toward the wardrobe room. Rose rushes to catch up, and taps his shoulder lightly. He turns around.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

Reid blinks. “My job is to save people,” he begins, voice trembling.

“Yeah, so’s ours. And we saved them today.”

“Don’t you get it, though?” Reid asks. “You saved _them_ —” he points toward the crew from the former planet base. “I mean, _we_ saved them—but we didn’t save all the Ood!” he says the name of the alien race so loudly that The Doctor overhears, and turns his head. “We both claimed to question whether it was right or wrong to treat them as servants, but at the end of the day, we didn’t even humanize them enough to think of them when—”

“What’s that?” The Doctor asks. “You mean you didn’t see me readjusting a third-level alternate dimension for …” He goes into a technobabble ramble. He continues routing the Tardis’s course with his right hand while pulling up a small TV screen with his right.

“Come over here.” The Doctor cocks his head since both his hands are occupied.

Rose locks her arm around Reid’s and walks him over. Reid stands behind The Doctor and looks at his screen.

“I learned something from you with the Cyberm—Cyber _people_ last time you came with us, Reid. And I haven’t forgotten,” The Doctor says.

At that moment, the TV screen reveals a digital image of the Tardis floating through space. Below the Tardis is the image of the emergency craft, but attached to it, is the entire base that it departed from. “Brought the whole thing with us. It only took a few extra routings, but I had to concentrate to do it, so I forgot to mention it in the moment.”

Reid’s face lights up, and he suddenly throws his arms around The Doctor’s side. They both laugh, and The Doctor reaches up to pat Reid’s arm as Reid awkwardly hugs him from behind.

“Oh, Thank God!” he declares.

 “Maybe there’s another reason you’re supposed to be with us.” Rose looks up into the corners of her eyes. “I mean, besides just the entanglement to begin with,” she suggests.

Reid pulls away from The Doctor and turns to hug Rose as well. He puts his arms around her softly, as if she’s his much younger sister.

************************************

After dropping off Ida, Zach, Toby, and The Ood on their home planet, Rose, Reid, and The Doctor gather in the Tardis wardrobe room to follow up on their entanglement.

Reid crouches in front of the small black safe. “All I’m saying is, Toby isn’t exactly a common name. And yet, in both of our … adventures,” he puts his hand on the front of the safe to access it, “we encountered young men named Toby within the same 24 hour span. And you know who else encountered a Toby?”

The safe opens, and Maeve’s copy of _The Sign of the Four_ is still sitting right where Reid left it.

“Sherlock Holmes,” The Doctor completes triumphantly.

“Exactly. Now, I haven’t reread the whole thing in _this_ copy yet.” Reid takes the book in his hands.

The Doctor raises his eyebrows in surprise.

“Maeve wants me to read it a little at a time for when we talk about it,” Reid defends himself, with sweetness in his voice as he says Maeve’s name. “But anyway, as I was saying, Holmes tells Watson to request Toby the dog in Chapter 7.”

“Toby’s a dog?” Rose asks.

“Told you ACD had a thing with them,” The Doctor quips. “Human, animal, alien boundaries … the anxiety makes a great story.”

Reid only half-smiles at The Doctor’s comment, and rises to his feet. He’s more focused on flipping through the book for the right page. When he finds the beginning of Chapter 7, a small envelope slips out. This startles all three of them—Reid, in fact, jumps backward a small step, as if the enveloped is something that might shatter at his feet.

Rose, on the other hand, instinctively bends down to pick it up. As she hands the envelope back to Reid, we see only the name _MAEVE_ scrawled across it in what looks like a man’s handwriting.

“How did I never find this in here before?” Reid shoves _The Sign of the Four_ into The Doctor’s hands and takes the envelope from Rose. He fumbles with it so much that he can’t even open it.

“Reid, what’s wrong? Calm down,” The Doctor immediately responds to Reid’s abnormal reaction.

“It was never sealed.” Rose adds, and points to the flap of the envelope, which, surely enough, was never glued shut.

Reid reaches his fingers into the opening and pulls out the letter. It is a nondescript piece of plain white paper, folded in half. Hands still shaking, Reid unfolds it.

“My dear Maeve,” Reid begins reading the letter out loud. “It’s been too long …”

************************************

Author’s Voiceover:

**_Next time on Doctor Spencer ... Who? : Episode 5, “Cybus on the Bus”_ **

_When Reid discovers a mysterious note from someone in Maeve’s past, he and The Doctor realize that their worlds are connected in more ways than one. As the group continues trying to understand the strange properties of Maeve’s book, and the connections it makes between Reid and The Doctor, the BAU faces two terrifying unsubs who reveal a critical piece of the puzzle._


End file.
